


Trinity House

by Renaerys



Category: Powerpuff Girls
Genre: Berserk is number one Blossick shipper whether she knows it yet or not and I will die on that hill, Boomer continues to be Best Boy in every conceivable way, F/F, F/M, Professor sciencing the shit out of every problem like a boss, acing the Bechdel test is a given I hope y'all know that by now, back on my BS with another adult!AU PPG fic, counterpart bonding, found family shenanigans, in which everyone sucks at teamwork and actually puts in the effort to improve?!, it's more likely than you think, no one needs a hug more than Brat, positive female friendship, that M rating is for smut, there are a few more tags that I'll add later in the story to avoid spoilers..., which i will forewarn in the chapter notes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-21
Updated: 2021-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:48:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 43,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26035183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Renaerys/pseuds/Renaerys
Summary: On the eve of a much anticipated family reunion at their childhood home, the Powerpuff Girls wake up in a strange place far, far from home with too many former nemeses and not enough answers. Together, the nine Supers will have to try to find a way to escape the living labyrinth known as Trinity House using a combination of punches, problem solving, and*gasp*teamwork. That is, if they don't kill each other first.PPG, RRB, PPNKG Adults AU
Relationships: Brick/Blossom Utonium, Butch/Buttercup Utonium, Robin Snyder/Bubbles Utonium
Comments: 130
Kudos: 147





	1. I Woke With a Head Full of Stars

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh shit here we go again, y’all! Welcome to my latest dalliance. As usual, this is primarily a Reds fic because at this point I think we all know what flaming dumpster I deserve to be tossed in. I'm trying some fun stuff with a Blues friendship that remains platonic, because hey, counterparts can be friends or family just as much as romantic partners! And I like my positive male/female friendships just as much as my positive female friendships, welcome. Punks are new additions to my writing with this fic, and I am _so_ excited to introduce my versions of them to you all! As usual, expect enough Sister Code to drown a whole man in (what better way to go, say I???). Counterpart bonding of all flavors is a BIG focus here. Soul bonds for the win… 😎
> 
> This is a very different fic from Beyond This Morning. There’s a big ol’ mystery and villain oozing from the cracks in the plaster of Trinity House, but they—and the House itself—are frosting on the interpersonal relationships cake. What do we really know about other people? What do we even truly know about ourselves? I think those can be very hard questions to answer, and they are central to this story and its characters’ journeys. However, as per my usual, everyone is an Adult™ and dealing with Adult™ issues and problems (and delights!), because I have a brand to maintain. Enjoy! 💖💙💚

“ _One need not be a chamber to be haunted,  
One need not be a house;  
The brain has corridors surpassing  
Material place._” - Emily Dickinson

* * *

Two gin and tonics and twice as many one-time-at-my-fraternity’s into the conversation, and Blossom Utonium decided she had smiled and looked pretty enough for one day. Her chair protested as she got up, took a last deep sip, and gathered her purse. Her date—Chad, or close enough—cut himself off mid-dish about a particularly memorable kegger, until it wasn’t. 

“Oh, ladies’ room?” he asked with a smile full of teeth. 

Blossom pushed her chair in and tucked her bangs behind her ear. “Sure.”

She fished a couple twenties from her wallet and slid them across the bar with a look to the bartender, who smiled like she didn’t mean it. In her defense, she probably wasn’t paid enough to mean it. 

Blossom was out the door and heading down the block without a second look back. Happy hour on a Thursday in downtown Metroville had become an exercise in dating app monotony rather than the escapist ritual she used to look forward to with her colleagues. She passed a glass storefront and stopped to check her reflection. Chic and professional with her long, red hair tied back in its customary ponytail, nonetheless her rosy eyes betrayed the specter of burn out that infected the halls of her law firm. She touched her cheek and wondered if twenty-eight was old enough to suffer her first wrinkles, or if it was just the aftertaste of her bad date. 

Her phone buzzed: fourteen unread work emails. Blossom quietly scanned the emails as her feet trudged the several blocks back to the law offices of Frost & Kline. Traffic was heavy at this hour, and she got stuck waiting at each intersection for the cross beacon. New matches popped up on her dating app, but she ignored them and turned off the notifications. She started to type out a message to the group chat she shared with her family, but halfway through she thought better of it and dialed her youngest sister. 

“Blossom, hi!” Bubbles said brightly when she picked up after two rings. “We were just talking about you!”

Blossom eyed the red stop hand on the crossing beacon and smirked. “Oh?”

“Hi, Blossom, how are you?” Robin Snyder’s voice sounded distant. Blossom imagined them making dinner together in their cozy apartment kitchen. 

“Hi, Robin. I’ll be better when I’m in Townsville tomorrow morning,” Blossom said. 

“Oooh, me too,” Bubbles said. “Buttercup’s on a case tomorrow, but she promised she’ll make it for dinner. The Professor’s so excited to have us all back home for the long weekend!”

Robin snorted in the background. “He’s been to Malph’s three times this week. Can you believe it? I went with him the third time so he wouldn’t forget anything.”

Blossom smiled. “I bet it was the highlight of his week. I can’t wait to be with all of you under one roof.”

The light changed, and Blossom crossed the wide street with the other pedestrians. Downtown Metroville’s skyscrapers shimmered like fish scales in the late afternoon sunlight, and the streets swam in their great shadows. 

“Hey, are you okay?” Bubbles asked. “It’s not like you to call when we’re about to see each other in person.”

“You know me too well.”

“We did share a cauldron. What’s up?” 

Blossom bit her lip as she approached the construction site obstructing the sidewalk ahead. Without thinking about it, she veered left to detour around with a few other pedestrians. “Nothing, just a bad date. I’m heading back to work now.”

“Ugh, it’s 6:30! You should be heading home to sweatpants and wine.”

“I wish. I have a few more hours of work to finish first if I want to be offline tomorrow.”

Bubbles made a scoffing sound. Blossom imagined her wrinkling her nose in that way that had always looked cute on her ever since they were kids. “You work way too much. The minute you finally quit that stupid law firm, we’re having a gigantic party for you— _but anyway_! Tell me about the date. What was wrong with him this time?”

“Nothing really. He just bored me—whoa!” A little girl cut Blossom off and dashed into an alley. Blossom stared after her, dazed. 

“Blossom? What’s wrong?” Bubbles asked. 

“I…” Was that little girl’s skin _shimmering_? Blossom changed course and followed her into the alley. “I’m not sure.”

“What do you mean, you’re not sure? Is everything okay?”

Blossom barely heard her as she wandered deeper into the dim alleyway, her black pumps echoing off the damp concrete. The little girl was bent over on the ground at the dead end, her yellow summer dress washed out and pale amidst the swimming shadows. 

A distant doorbell rang on the other end of the line, followed by Robin’s nasally, “I’ll get it!”

The little girl stifled a sob. Even in the gloom, her dark skin glimmered, iridescent. 

“Hey,” Blossom said, soft and warm as she cautiously approached. “Are you lost?”

“What’s going on?” Bubbles demanded. 

Blossom reached out her hand to the girl, but before she could touch her strange skin, the girl snatched her wrist in a vice grip. Blossom gasped and dropped her phone as she yanked back, but even her Super strength could not break the girl’s hold.

“Blossom! What’s— Oh my god, Robin!” Bubbles’ voice faded from the line, but Blossom barely heard her as she stared at the girl who was no girl at all. Instinct and fear and something far more primal ignited her veins, and Chemical X surged with phantom force beneath her skin as she pushed back against her would-be assailant. Pink sparks flew between them and raced up the little girl’s arm, swirling her strange colors and accomplishing little else. 

“Save your Source,” the girl who wasn’t a girl said in a voice far too old for her small frame. “You will need it where you’re going.”

Blossom cut her losses and summoned the eternal winter in her lungs, but before she could get a breath out, the iridescent girl pulsed. Acute nausea crippled Blossom where she stood like lightning, so enervating that she was force to take a knee as her head spun. The girl-creature let go, and where her small hand had been, oily ooze marred Blossom’s wrist. Freezing slush spilled from her lips, putrid with gin and tonic, as she doubled over on her hands and knees and heaved. 

The last thing she saw was the thing that had so easily subdued her looming over her, shining like a smear of sun-kissed grease on asphalt, and everything faded to black. 

* * *

Blossom came to with a head full of stars and a sour taste on her tongue. The grass under her cheek smelled as sweet as Spring, and sunlight filtered through the lush canopy high above. Rosy eyes opened to a dream, hazy and warm, and a smile she couldn’t shake. She had the most absurd urge to giggle as she wondered whether she’d fallen asleep in her office again. God, it even _smelled_ like heaven—ozone spicy and sweet, and the heady lassitude of unfettered confidence.

She gave into her ludicrous desire and giggled. The loopy joy shuddered through her entire body as if it were a flower unfurling under the sun, and oh! What a bright sun it was! Lethargic yet bizarrely invigorated like she had never felt in her life, Blossom sat up in the grass and pushed her long hair out of her face. Whatever this dream was, she hoped it would last just a little bit longer until she inevitably woke up drooling on her desk with an asset purchase agreement to revise. 

Another giggle answered hers. 

“Now I know I’m hallucinating,” slurred a familiar, dream-tempered voice. 

Blossom blinked her glassy eyes at the woman seated on her haunches at the base of a great tree with bark as glossy as kerosene. Her long red hair cascaded from its high ponytail in curly waves over her navy blue dress, and there was a light in her magenta eyes that leered. “Berserk?”

It came out half a question and half a laugh. What were the chances that the cousin she had not seen in half a lifetime would be here in her dream that probably, dreadfully wasn’t a dream at all because the last thing Blossom remembered was the alley and the girl who wasn’t a girl, and then—

“Oh, fuck.” Berserk slapped a hand over her painted mouth to stifle a groaning giggle, but her dusky eyes flashed with lucid fury. 

Blossom’s body _moved_. With all the grace of a slattern in her cups, she scrambled backwards like she wasn’t Super and capable because honestly? Right now she didn’t even know what day it was, and the warm wall she bumped into held no sympathy for her. 

“Ow,” he chuckled, like it was funny. “Watch it.”

Every nerve in Blossom’s body burst to life as if someone had lit her fuse and it was the Fourth of freaking July. With a yelp, she backhanded her unwitting victim in the face and he went flying straight into a tree. A massive trail of ice bloomed in his path and fused him to the black bark at the chin. 

Red eyes locked on Blossom’s. 

No one was laughing anymore as reality hit them like a bad hangover. 

Blossom clutched her hand—crusted with ice like it had never once been before—to her chest. “Brick—”

Her overpowered ice immolated where he dug his fingers into it, shimmering with heat she’d never known him capable of channeling from his bare hands, but it was too late. Grass shriveled to ashes at her feet and orange fire shot from the soil like saplings chasing the sun: greedy vines, greedy for her. Blossom jumped to her feet and raised her hands to defend, only to feel winter’s vengeance roar in her bones like a bear waking from hibernation. Unspeakable power snapped and crackled in the very air around her, conductive. The ice at her fingertips and the wall it wove was almost and only a consolation, and anyway, she didn’t have time to dwell on the improbable when her mind raced with the high of this place, the very _air—_

“Oh, shit.” Brick’s surprise was only marginally overshadowed by the contrition in his expletive, but the immense column of fire gorging on Blossom’s ice overshadowed even that. Blossom launched into the air away from the conflagration, her head pounding but her wits fast returning as her nose acclimated to the acrid sting in the air she had known all her life, just never in such permeating prevalence. 

The molten fire and ice burst, and Blossom twisted, a warning on her lips: “Watch out!”

Berserk was already on her feet and moving fast, arms outstretched and reaching for the power that had never been hers and she’d never needed. But instead of redirecting the elements away as was her prerogative, they swarmed her like flies to honey. 

Brick was moving even before Blossom, but neither made it two steps before the smoke and steam cleared. Berserk floated in a daze, her arms sleeved in flames and frost and her black blazer absolutely ruined for her trouble. Mad magenta met nonplussed pink, and she _screeched._

“What the _fuck is this_?!”

Blossom had a headache. Today sucked. She began to float back down to the ground. “O-Okay, just remain calm.”

“I’m _on fire_!” Berserk shook her flaming arm in case it wasn’t already obvious. 

“You’re also frozen,” Brick said.

“Eat my entire ass, _Brick_ ,” Berserk spat, and she flipped him off with her frosted hand. 

“Stop!” Blossom shouted, breathing hard as she tried to wrap her mind around Berserk armored in fire and ice. “Are you in pain at all?”

Berserk tore her venomous gaze from Brick, and it helped a little. She flexed her fists. “No, it’s actually…”

Blossom felt the pull of Brick’s eyes on her, and she locked gazes with him briefly. Stunning and soulless, those red eyes held her even now like no one else could, even after so many years free of his suffocating proximity in narrow high school halls. 

“So release it,” Brick said, looking back at Berserk. 

Berserk wrinkled her nose. “It’s your power; _you_ release it.”

“Not anymore, it’s not,” Blossom said in a daze.

Berserk looked between them, pupils dilated and her X off the charts as power jumped and sparked upon her skin, but her square face slackened in an inborn understanding that needed nothing but an absolute trust in her abilities to prove right. With a grunt of effort, Berserk twisted her body around and thrust her arms out at her sides. Fire and ice erupted from her fists in two forceful blasts, incinerating the grass and making the chemical air blister with mist. 

For a protracted moment, the three of them stared at each other, incredulous and quietly calculating. 

Until a banshee scream split their eardrums and possibly ruptured the stratosphere. They covered their ears, and Brick cursed colorfully. Blossom’s blood ran cold. She knew that scream.

“Bubbles,” she gasped. 

She didn’t wait for Brick and Berserk before taking off flying. 

* * *

Bubbles slapped her hands over her mouth to stifle the scream that should not have come out Sonic. It shredded a path through the white sand beach and absorbed into the deep black sea that stretched as far as the eye could see. 

The fight that had been about to break out between Buttercup on one side and Brat and Brute on the other came to a dead stand-still, and all eyes turned to Bubbles. A hand on her shoulder made her yelp, and she clamped her hands over her mouth hard. 

“Bubbles, what the hell?” Boomer said, his blue eyes searching hers as he gently pried her hands from her flushed face. “Are you okay?”

Brat rolled her eyes and flipped her long blonde twin tails. Her many gold bracelets clinked on her wrist. “Obviously _not_ , genius.”

“What did you do?” Buttercup demanded. She grabbed Brute by the collar of her T-shirt and yanked her down a couple inches to eye-level. Green sparks burst around them, congealing the sand at their feet to glass.

“Do?” Brute said, cool as a cucumber and nearly as inanimate. But her dark green eyes narrowed at Buttercup’s challenge, and she closed her hand around Buttercup’s fist in her shirt.

“Well, it sure the fuck wasn’t anything I did,” Buttercup spat. “One minute I’m in the shower, and the next I’m here, high as a kite and fucking bedazzled?” She waved her other wrist, jingling a slim silver bangle identical to the one Bubbles had woken up with.

“Newsflash, _cuz_. We all are! So quit your bitching,” Brat interrupted. She demonstrated her matching silver bangle like the inconvenience weighed heavily on her.

The second Buttercup turned her rancor on Brat was the second Brute got serious and shoved her roughly away with enough force to crack stone. 

“Oh, come _on_ ,” Boomer said. “Really?”

Brute positioned herself in front of her baby sister, while Butch caught Buttercup in his shield before she could eat sand. Ears no longer ringing after Bubbles’ unexpected Sonic Scream, Butch was back and feral as the day he was born facing down Brute. 

“Do that again, _please_ ,” he taunted her, grinning as he levitated Buttercup trapped in his shield. 

Brute curled a fist and summoned green energy. She sneered at Butch. “And they call _me_ Brute.”

“Butch, I swear to god—!” Buttercup shouted.

With a cackle, Butch threw Buttercup encased in the shield at Brute, and Bubbles choked not to scream as she watched it all happen like a car crash. Brute jumped and punched the impenetrable shield with her bare fist, miraculously shattering it like none—to Bubbles' knowledge—had ever been able to do. A thousand neon shards sparkled in the sun, but only for a moment before Buttercup gathered them to her open palms in razor-sharp discs and launched them back at Brute at nearly point-blank range. 

A brilliant flash of pink dashed in between the Greens as Blossom appeared out of nowhere and tackled Buttercup safely out of Brute’s punching range, and not a moment too soon. The discs hit Brute and awakened something primordial in the nonchalant Super that Butch seemed to smell like blood in the water. Even Brat backed away, perhaps sensing the true danger about to erupt. 

But before Butch and Brute could continue the ugly brawl, Brick was there. Fire blossomed from the sand where he landed in between them like a particularly well-dressed demon summoned from some infernal abyss. It had been ages since Bubbles had seen him, but even months could not dull his sepulchral push, now magnified by whatever was in the air putting everyone on edge. 

“Enough,” he commanded. 

Butch faltered; Brute did not. Her punch cracked like thunder against Brick’s open palm where he caught it, and he cracked in turn. Bubbles couldn’t contain her voice anymore at the sickening crunch of bones up and down Brick’s arm, and the roar of the fire that followed. 

Brute hissed in pain where her arm caught fire, and Brat covered her mouth in horror. Before it could catch on Brute’s shirt sleeve, the conflagration peeled from her arm like shed skin and snaked through the air toward a soot-smeared Berserk hovering over them all. The flames on the sand followed, drawn to her outstretched arm as though sucked through a straw, and in one elegant sweep, she launched the pennon safely into the sky. 

“Berserk?” Brat gasped, staring as though she had seen a ghost. 

Blossom was in Brick’s face in a flash. “You can’t use your fire so indiscriminately here!” 

“Fuck _off_ ,” he hissed, his eyes squeezed tight. He clutched his shattered arm to his side, waiting for it to knit back together. “Would you rather I let them kill each other? In this atmosphere, they could.”

Boomer flew to his side, and Bubbles was right behind him. “Shit, dude, your hand’s purple.”

Bubbles could not bring herself to look at the ghastly injury. Nearby, Brute was not much better off as Brat hovered protectively close to her. 

“Brick, what the hell is your problem!” Brat screeched. 

Brick breathed through his gritted teeth and turned his scathing glare on her. “Lower your fucking voices, all of you.” 

Brat sparked blue in her anger, but Blossom put up her hand in a silent dismissal. The look of abject offense that twisted Brat’s pretty face may have been comical if they weren’t all on some weird island, likely abducted, and without any explanation as to why. 

“Everyone, please calm down,” Blossom said, quiet yet firm. “Brute, are you healing?”

“She’s fine,” Berserk answered for her sister, touching down on the sand. “Brick’s fire is nothing more than a tickle.”

Brute fixed her sister and former leader with an unreadable look that sent a chill down Bubbles’ spine. Nonetheless, the burn blisters on her arm were shrinking rapidly. Soon, the damage would be totally reversed. “Sure,” Brute said, and cracked her neck. 

“Good. Brick?” Blossom asked. 

“He’s fine too,” Butch answered for him, a lilt of challenge in his voice as he eyed Brute like a newly turned zombie. 

Brick’s hand had turned a splotchy yellowish brown as the bones mended in overdrive. He ignored Blossom and instead said, “Don’t even think about it, Butch.”

“I never do, you know that.”

Berserk grinned. “I don’t know. I for one wouldn’t mind a little entertainment. Been a while since we were all in one place.”

Brick and Blossom glared at their ever incendiary counterpart. But it was Brat who drew Bubbles’ wary suspicion and sent a nervous chill down her spine. The sudden and unexpected venom with which Brat looked at her sister and leader could have poisoned stone. 

“Wait, Brick, what did you mean before?” Bubbles asked in an effort to defuse the tension. “About the atmosphere, I mean.”

Brick and Blossom both looked at her, and Bubbles could not help but shrink under their combined intensity. For two people who had always loathed each other despite their siblings’ closeness, they were frighteningly in sync in their commanding presence.

“We think there’s Chemical X in the air,” Blossom announced for everyone to hear. “That’s why we woke up feeling so groggy.”

“No shit? Damn, no wonder I feel fucking amazing!” Butch said, giddy. 

Brick bared his teeth. “You’re high off your ass. We all are. Until we acclimate, there will be absolutely _no_ more powers—”

Butch took off into the air in a blaze of green.

“You were saying?” Berserk said with a wide smile. 

Brick snorted smoke, and Buttercup yanked Blossom and Bubbles both out of his immediate vicinity just in case. 

Boomer sighed. “I’ll get him—oh my god!” He launched skyward in a panic, and just in time. 

Butch was falling as though he’d forgotten he had Super powers. “Fuuuuuuuck!”

Berserk’s grin fell, and she took off flying without warning. Boomer landed safely on the beach with Butch in his arms, shaking like a child. 

“Dude, what happened?!” Boomer said. 

“My powers,” Butch said, clutching his short dark hair like his head might explode. “I don’t know, they just disappeared. Oh, shit—”

Buttercup yanked Butch off of Boomer and aimed him at the inky water, where he promptly hurled. Her expression was grim as she held him up while he wretched, trembling pathetically. 

Bubbles clutched her stomach, sick at the sight of Butch’s suffering. “Antidote X?”

“Seems like it,” Blossom said, her gaze faraway and deep in thought. 

“Where the fuck are we?” Brute demanded, scary and one hundred percent done. 

“You really don’t know?” Buttercup said, tucking her loose black bangs behind her ear as she held Butch up by his meaty neck. 

Brute shook her head. “Of course not.”

Blossom and Brick were oddly silent. Bubbles nudged her sister. “Blossom?”

She snapped to attention, and her eyes found Brick’s. “The air is naturally saturated with X.”

“The flora too,” he said, unsteady like he couldn’t quite believe it. “And the sea.”

“Do you think…?” They shared a meaningful, pissed-off look.

Brick ran his healed hand through his short red hair. “It’s the least implausible possibility.”

“But it’s _ludicrous_.”

“Yes, _thank you_ , Blossom. I totally hadn’t considered that.”

She glowered like she was considering turning him into a red hot popsicle, but she held her tongue.

Bubbles looked to Boomer for answers, and he shook his head. 

“Can you share with the rest of the class, please?” Bubbles said. 

Brat swore, and all eyes turned to her. “I have no service!” She had her iPhone out as she floated around searching for bars. “What kind of nightmare place is this?!”

“The kind completely surrounded by an Antidote X barrier,” Berserk said when she landed in the sand. She had shed her ruined blazer somewhere, leaving her only in her blue office dress and boots. “It’s centered on the house and extends in a dome a few miles out in every direction. There’s no getting past it.”

Butch wheezed. “Coulda mentioned that before.”

Berserk ignored him. Her magenta eyes caught the setting sun in a baleful glare. Bubbles suppressed a shudder. 

“Seriously?” Boomer asked. “You mean…we’re trapped here?”

Berserk eyed him askance. “Well, we’re not here for a fucking book club.”

Boomer flushed fantastically and clasped his hands together in front of him.

“Hold on, what did you just say?” Buttercup demanded. “What house?”

Berserk paid her about as much attention as she may have paid a mosquito buzzing in her ear. “The only house on this planet, as far as we’re concerned.”

“Planet?” Brute was suddenly in her sister’s face. She glared at Berserk like a starving lion, but Berserk merely smiled enigmatically. 

“Yes,” Blossom said before a fight could break out between the volatile sisters. “The atmosphere, the natural life, it all points to an alien ecosystem. There’s no place on Earth like this.”

“Aliens?” Bubbles said, unable to help the quaver in her voice. Boomer looked at her with those big baby blues, but he didn’t reach for her. 

“No,” Brat said. “No _way_. Uh-uh, _no_. I’m out of here.”

Brick materialized in front of her before she could fly off, and a very strange look passed between them. “No, you’re not.” He had her by the wrist, and Brat seemed to summon the ten plagues of Egypt upon him with a single look. “None of us are.”

“Let _go_.” Brat yanked her hand free, and he let her. 

Brute was suddenly by her side, but she didn’t say a word, and neither did Brick. 

_Since when are they so familiar?_ Bubbles could not help but wonder. 

“I think I was abducted,” Blossom said. “The last thing I remember was a little girl with the strangest skin. I don’t think she was human.”

“Skin like an oil slick?” Butch said, wiping his mouth. He was unsteady on his feet after being AX’d, but he managed to remain standing. “They got me and Buttercup too. Not a little girl, but an old man.”

Buttercup stuffed her hands in the pockets of her too-big sweatpants and scowled. “So what, we were abducted by aliens? Give me a fucking break.”

Bubbles barely heard the conversation as her mind immediately fled to thoughts of Robin. There had been someone at the door while Bubbles was on the phone with Blossom, and Robin… “Oh my god.” Bubbles tugged on her curly pig tails as her throat twisted in agony at the memory of finding Robin on the floor and that iridescent _thing_ looming over her—

“Bubbles,” Boomer said. His hand was warm on her cheek, tried and true, and for a moment it was too much. “What is it?”

“Robin, she… The last thing I remember—”

“Robin’s not here,” Buttercup said, firm but not unkind. “Seems like they just wanted us. She’s probably safe back home.”

Uncontrollable, Bubbles blinked through her tears imagining Robin’s gruesome end at the hands of whatever that creature had been masquerading as a person. 

“Hey, you can’t think like that, okay?” Boomer said softly for her ears only. “Robin’s okay. Whatever we’re here for, it has nothing to do with her. The aliens had no reason to harm her once they got you.”

Overcome, Bubbles hugged him fiercely, and he held her up like he always did. Around them, the frenetic conversation continued. 

“Where’s the house you mentioned?” Blossom asked. 

Berserk floated into the air and looked down on her cousin and counterpart with an unsettling smirk. “Right this way, Blossy.”

Blossom bristled visibly at that infantilizing nickname Berserk had given her when they were kids and kept in her arsenal just because it pissed Blossom off to no end, even years later. But Blossom followed her over the sand dune, and Buttercup and Brick pursued. 

“Bring him,” Brick ordered Boomer before flying after his counterparts. 

Bubbles brought up the rear with Boomer and Butch behind Brute and Brat farther ahead, her eyes lingering on her cousin and counterpart. It had been years since she’d seen Brat and her sisters. How odd that their reunion should be here, on an alien planet far from home. Why? Why them? 

“Hey,” Butch said as Boomer held him up. He flexed his fist, and green sparks danced across his knuckles. “My powers’re coming back!”

“That was fast,” Bubbles said, frowning. _Too fast…_

The air smelled sharp and chemical, like the remains of a fire on the beach long since burned out, but it wasn’t unpleasant. Could it really be true that Chemical X saturated the air, like Blossom had said? How was that possible? Was that why her scream had turned Sonic even without the concentrated effort it required on Earth? 

_Oh my god, I’ve been abducted by aliens._

“Shit,” Bubbles gasped. 

Butch and Boomer glanced at her. “Uh, sugar?” Butch said. “Did you just—”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Bubbles said quickly, forcing a smile. “Sorry, please, just…”

“Hey,” Boomer said as they crested the huge dune. 

Whatever he meant to say faded away when the house Berserk had alluded to came into view against the setting sun, and Bubbles lost her breath.

* * *

It was massive, unlike anything Blossom had ever seen before. A cubist explosion of concrete and high-vaulted windows, the house was a Brutalist fantasy so at odds with the prolific X-enhanced trees and gardens surrounding it that Blossom had to remind herself this was no fever dream. Veins of stained glass threaded through the concrete façade and pulsed in the setting sun, reds and blues and greens melted together like dimensional rifts. The structure stood eight, perhaps nine stories tall, and it spanned the width of a Metroville city block. The gardens surrounding it overflowed with color and life, and a deep black pool stretched from the edge of the property to the front double doors. They were iron-wrought and carved in the shape of an equilateral triangle, and they opened automatically for the Supers as they approached. 

The silver bangle on Blossom’s wrist warmed when she passed under the threshold. Wary, she clutched it in her hands, searching for any trick. But it appeared to be a simple silver charm, nothing more. She looked up and found Brick nearby scrutinizing his own bangle with the same suspicious curiosity. 

“We all have them,” she said, approaching. 

“Cool,” he said flatly. He ran his hand through his tousled hair, a nervous habit he’d had since they were kids. 

Blossom frowned. Why did she have to remember such useless information about him after all these years?

“Hooooly shit,” Buttercup said. 

The main floor entrance was a concrete dead space of sharp corners and high vaulted ceilings. Cold and empty save for the abstract fountain in the center of the foyer gushing black X water and the double balcony staircase leading to the second floor, there was nothing but glass and grey and the same equilateral triangle crest emblazoned at the center of the balcony. 

“Welcome, Sourcerers. Please enter.”

The toneless voice belonged to a humanoid construct that descended the stairs one step at a time. Its body was sleek silver and its face was recognizably designed with two black eyes and a mouth, except its mouth did not move. 

Before Blossom could address the automaton, Berserk ambushed it on the staircase with her magenta blasters and razed it to its parts. 

“Goddamnit!” Buttercup shouted and dashed to attack her. 

Berserk pushed off the staircase and met Buttercup’s grazing punch with a deft parry that used her own momentum against her to send her crashing into the concrete staircase. Buttercup was hardly fazed and shook the grey dust from her T-shirt and sweats, livid. “What the fuck did you do that for, you psycho?!”

Berserk wasn’t even looking at her. Rather, her gaze was fixed on the automaton’s remains, and so was Blossom’s. It began to reassemble before her very eyes, piece by piece until it was standing on its too long legs once more. Painted eyes swept over the gathered Supers, unperturbed. “As I said, please enter. You are most welcome here.”

Blossom stared at the impossible technology they were up against: indestructible and vastly intelligent. Berserk floated down to the floor and crossed her arms, resigned. 

“Where is here, exactly?” Blossom said, drawing up next to Berserk and mirroring her closed-off pose. 

The automaton inclined its plated head at the Reds and folded its hands like it was nervous. The sight made Blossom’s skin crawl. “You have many questions, and I will endeavor to answer to them. I am here to assist and oversee your trials.”

Brick smoldered with unnecessary heat next to Blossom. Casual with his hands in his suit pockets, he nonetheless radiated agitation and malice that she was grudgingly grateful to have on her side. 

The automaton bowed low. “Welcome to Trinity House.”

* * *

Professor John Utonium whistled as he smoothed the bedspread in Buttercup’s preserved room. The house keepers had come and gone for the month and the house was as spotless as it was going to get. A part of him missed the days when he would clean everything himself, but between his tenure at Townsville Scientific University and his personal lab work, there was little time for much else. This weekend, however, he would make time. 

A framed picture on the nightstand showed a much younger version of himself when he’d had more pepper than salt in his hair, along with his three daughters gathered around him for their Junior Girl Scout troop’s father-daughter dance. He picked up the frame and smiled softly. Tomorrow could not come soon enough. 

His cell phone vibrated in the pocket of his green terrycloth bathrobe, and he set the picture aside. A quick glance at his watch told him it was much too late in the evening for a work call. He stood up and stretched his back, fished his phone out, and answered immediately when he saw the caller ID.

“Robin, hello,” he said. “It’s quite late. Is everything—”

Her frantic voice cut him off as she spoke too fast and too panicked to make much sense. 

“All right, slow down. What do you mean, Bubbles is gone?”

“Listen to me, Professor,” Robin said. She sounded out of breath. “I’m going to the police right now. I couldn’t get in touch with Blossom or Buttercup either. I’m worried they were also taken—”

The doorbell rang just as John reached the top of the stairs, and he froze. Who could be at his door at 10 o’clock at night? “Taken?” he said as he answered the door. “Who could have possibly taken my girls…” 

“The same people who took mine, if I had to wager,” said the midnight visitor on the doorstep. “And you know I’ve never been the wagering type.”

Robin’s voice faded to the background as John stared aghast at a face he hoped he would never see again outside of scientific journals and the occasional technical interview. “Plutonium.”

“Who?” Robin asked over the phone.

“I…”

“Just Eric. No need to be so formal,” Eric said, shoving his way inside past John, who was too stunned to stop him. “We’re still family, after all.”

Despite their close age, the years had been kinder to John’s estranged cousin. Eric had always been fuller of frame and athletically inclined, and that had not changed under the tailored suit he wore. He stroked his trimmed beard, and his fingers lingered on a thick pink scar from a childhood accident John had tried very hard to forget. 

“Eric,” John said more firmly, shutting the door behind him. “What are you doing here?”

Eric slipped his hands in his pockets and peered at John with the eye that wasn’t concealed behind a black eyepatch. “I’m here to help. You’re going to need it if you want to get your girls back.”

“Professor? What’s going on over there?” Robin demanded. 

Conscious thought finally caught up to the reality of Eric Plutonium standing here in his home despite the years of exile. “Robin,” he said into the phone, “forget about the police. I don’t think they’ll be able to help us, after all. Come to the house and I’ll explain everything.”

“Wait, but what about—”

He hung up the phone and slipped it into the pocket of his bathrobe. 

Eric’s face twisted in a wolfish grin. “Reason over passion, good. This wasn’t a wasted trip, after all. Our blood may be bad, but it’s still blood.” 

John didn’t even look at him as he passed him to head upstairs to his bedroom. “I’m going to change. When I get back, you’re going to tell me everything you know about my girls’ abduction and pray that I don’t suspect you’re hiding anything.”

Eric’s smile dropped along with the temperature in the room. “I assure you, John, I come in peace. And I need your help as much as you need mine if we’re going to get our girls back. We’re on the same side.”

“No, we’re not. You made that clear a long time ago.” Before Eric could respond, John locked himself in his bedroom and rubbed his shaking hands over his clean-shaven face. It was hot in here, asphyxiating even. He shucked his bathrobe and went to the bathroom to splash water on his face. There were too many white hairs mixing with the black of his thick eyebrows. Crows’ feet trampled the corners of his dark eyes. 

_“You mean, those’re tiny footprints?!”_

The memory was decades old from a night not long after the Girls were born and Bubbles asked if she could touch his face. Even now, her wonder was a light that never failed to brighten his nights alone in this house that was too big for one person alone. This house that would be hers and Robin’s one day when they were ready to start a family of their own. But now…

John dried his face and dressed in jeans and an old MIT Class of ’84 T-shirt. God, he was really doing this. After years of estrangement and a bitter parting, he was going to listen to Eric with an open mind because this was about his daughters and he would do anything for them. Whatever had taken them and their Super cousins could not possibly be of this mundane world to have overpowered them, to have brought Eric to his door. 

Eric was examining the framed picture of John and the Girls on the mantle when John emerged from his room. 

“Ready?” Eric asked. 

John peered down at him from the second floor balcony. “If I find out you’re lying about anything,” John said quietly, “we’re finished. I’ll forget you ever existed.”

“Then it behooves me to be brutally honest.” Eric replaced the picture of Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup in kindergarten on the mantle and faced John. “They’re back, John.”

John stiffened. He dared not ask; there was no need. 

“The creatures who brought that stash of Chemical X you and I discovered all those years ago,” Eric went on in a voice like iron. “I think they returned to Earth to collect what’s theirs.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Have I piqued your interest? Please let me know by leaving kudos and comments below! They mean so much and remind me I get to go on this adventure with all you lovely readers right there with me. 
> 
> ***For early sneak peeks of new chapters and new fics, be sure to check out my Instagram [@renaerys_fic](https://www.instagram.com/renaerys_fic/)!
> 
> Next time: The Supers have more questions than answers about the House, and they accidentally trigger their first trial.


	2. The Rule of Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so pleased by the warm reception this fic’s first chapter received. Thank you so much to everyone who commented, left kudos, and bookmarked! And thank you to everyone on Instagram and Tumblr for sending messages of encouragement and support, you are all so wonderful. 😊
> 
> Trinity House has fanart! The lovely Gen_ovah drew [Berserk being the absolute HBIC goddess she is](https://www.instagram.com/p/CEWk9b1hc4f/). Follow @gen_ovah on Instagram to see more of her art!

“Welcome to Trinity House,” the creepy automaton said.

Brat grimaced. _Sounds like a cult._ She fully expected a bunch of brainwashed hippie women hopped up on LSD to pop out from behind the concrete corners with knives at the behest of some messianic alien overlord.

She needed a drink. She needed to get the hell out of this psycho place.

“Great. How do we leave?” Berserk asked.

She needed to get away from _her_.

Blue eyes found Brute’s, and Brute’s hand found hers. Cool and firm, there was a power in that hand that may have been enough if they were not stuck on an alien planet with no WiFi. Wait, maybe?

Brat checked her phone again. No bars, no new notifications.

_Goddamnit._

“By following the Rule of Three,” the automaton answered Berserk’s question.

“Which means?” Butch demanded.

Brat rolled her eyes at him. What a moron, going and losing his powers all half-cocked and unthinking. Brick shot his brother a warning look, and Brat accidentally caught his eye. She looked away immediately and pretended to be super engrossed in her cuticle lines, hoping Brick hadn’t noticed (of course he noticed; he _always_ noticed).

“The Rule of Three is balance,” the automaton waxed on. “It is law. It is the key.”

Yup. Definitely a cult.

“What is this planet?” Blossom said, stepping forward. “Who brought us here? And for what purpose?”

The automaton may have blinked in confusion if it could blink. “I am sure you have many questions. All answers lie within; you need only seek them out.”

“All of them, huh?” Brick sneered. “How convenient.”

“Uh-huh, cool, so this is a giant waste of time,” Buttercup said. “I say we find our own way out of here.”

“What about the AX barrier?” Bubbles asked.

Brat took a good look at her cousin and counterpart. She was doing that deer-in-the-headlights look and clasping her hands as if to let go would topple her like a thumb-push doll. A simple golden band ringed her finger, almost too thin to notice. Brat bit the inside of her cheek.

“AX doesn’t kill us,” Brat said. “Did you seriously forget?”

“Not on Earth, but we don’t know its full effect on us in this atmosphere,” Blossom said, turning her frigid gaze on Brat. “It’s not safe to make assumptions about things we don’t fully understand yet.”

Brat froze— _froze_ , like an amateur; it had been so long since she’d heard that patronizing tone directed entirely at her, and she was out of practice, her skin too soft and her heart unguarded. Blossom had already moved on, but Berserk’s luminous eyes lingered on Brat with a voyeuristic sort of pity. She looked like she might burst out laughing at any moment.

The automaton was saying something, but Brat didn’t hear it. She didn’t hear her own muttered excuse. She didn’t hear Brute’s voice telling her not to leave, they didn’t even know where they were. And she didn’t hear Berserk at all, never a goddamned word from her.

Brat dashed down the nearest corridor as fast as she could, and she didn’t look back.

* * *

Brick stared down the corridor where Brat had disappeared and spared her cowering flight a cursory thought. _Really, though?_ Blossom had always been an uptight, holier-than-thou bore, but she was polite and magnanimous to a downright annoying extent. The flash of concern in her pink eyes when Brat fled made him want to roll his.

“Wait, come back!” Blossom called after Brat and Brute, who had followed her.

Brick curled his lip in disgust.

“You need to go after them,” Blossom said. She was talking to Berserk, and Brick took that as his cue to tune her out.

“So, this Rule of Three,” he said to the automaton. “What else can you tell us about it? You mentioned it’s how we get out of here?”

The automaton was about to respond, but Berserk and Blossom were arguing over it.

“Why the hell would I do that?” Berserk sneered. “I don’t know my way around the House. Who knows what kind of danger could be lurking around the corner?”

“That’s exactly why, obviously. They’re your sisters,” Blossom shot back.

“Yeah, my _sisters_ , not my children. They can dig their own graves just fine without my help, trust me.”

“Hey, over here.” Brick snapped his fingers in the automaton’s face, but it appeared totally engrossed in Blossom and Berserk’s argument.

“Uh, so, should we go after them?” Boomer asked.

Brick growled. “Absolutely not. We don’t know anything about the House. Stay where you are.”

“Fine,” Blossom said. “I’ll go. Bubbles, Buttercup, stay here until I get back.” With that she disappeared in a flash of pink.

“Yeah, right.” Buttercup dashed down the hall after Blossom, and Butch, the imbecile, followed in a burst of green. Since when did he get his powers back so fast?

“Don’t even _think_ about it,” Brick said, whirling on the Blues.

Berserk laughed lowly, and Brick turned his venomous glare on her. There was a cut to the shape of her magenta eyes that made her appear as though they had been chiseled into her skull, ghoulishly gorgeous. “Nice flex, Fearless Leader.”

Brick swallowed the unsettling lump in his throat just breathing the same air as his chaotic counterpart and flexed in the literal sense as he weaponized his superior height and build over her. “What would you know about leading? Blossom’s the one looking after your team out there.” Berserk dropped her smarmy smile real fast. Brick didn’t spare her a moment more and grabbed the automaton by its manufactured neck. “Where did they go?”

He channeled his power, amazed by its ultra-heightened potency on this planet. What had taken concentrated effort and direction on Earth just to summon his fire breath came as easy as, well, breathing here: involuntary and natural, like he’d been doing it all his life. Heat pooled in his palm, and smoke rose where he had his hold on the automaton. It didn’t flinch.

“To begin the first trial,” the automaton said. “I will await your return.”

Brick was about to ask what the hell that meant, but the automaton melted through his fingers into a black puddle of X and absorbed into the tiled floor like the Wicked Witch of the West.

“What the _fuck_ ,” Berserk said.

Brick swallowed and said nothing. There was nothing more to say.

_What the hell is this place?_

A low boom reverberated the House’s foundations like a dynamite blast.

“Okay, that’s it. We’re going _now_.” Bubbles dashed down the corridor, dragging Boomer behind her.

Brick and Berserk exchanged a look of unfiltered incredulity, and by some unspoken agreement they followed the Blues deeper into the House in search of their siblings and whatever trial they had triggered.

* * *

“Where did they go?” Blossom wondered aloud as the corridor opened up into a truly enormous room several stories tall. A web of wide staircases wound around the open area floor plan. The walls pebbled with long geometric protrusions that gave the illusion of windows in the cold concrete façade. Blossom’s head spun looking up at a winding tree taller than any she had ever seen before. It stretched from the bottom floor far below to the blinding white ceiling, its bark a glossy black like the ones in the forest and its fleshy leaves sheltering plump golden fruit. Stained glass cut through the upper walls like lighting bolts, letting in beams of blue and red and green. “Wow…”

Trinity House had been impressive from the outside, but this was more space than Blossom had ever fathomed within the confines of four walls.

“Brat!”

Brute’s deep voice drew Blossom’s attention, and she dashed to the upper floor in pursuit. Brute was pounding on a smooth section of the wall that would not have caught Blossom’s attention if not for the triangular indentation that cut around it like a doorframe. But there was no door.

“What’s going on?” Blossom demanded.

Brute punched the wall hard, but it didn’t even crack. “She’s in there,” Brute said through gritted teeth.

“What do you mean—”

“She’s _in there_ ,” Brute cut her off. There was a manic glint in her dark green eyes that gave Blossom pause. It was years since she’d last seen any of her cousins, but she remembered Brute’s rare destructive fury when she was pushed too far.

“Okay, you mean behind the wall?” Blossom tried to keep her voice calm.

“Hey!” Buttercup shouted up at them. She and Butch had followed Blossom, and now they stopped dead in their tracks at the sight of the giant tree connecting floor to ceiling. “Holy shit…”

Instead of answering, Brute continued to pound on the wall, and Blossom was momentarily stunned to watch.

_How is it not even cracking?_

Somewhere far away, as though from underwater, a woman screamed. The strangled growl Brute emitted like a wounded animal was all the confirmation Blossom needed. She powered up her pink blasters and aimed her fists at the wall. “We’re going to get her out of there. Let me help you.”

“Uh, what’s going on?” Butch touched down at the top of the stairs just as Blossom and Brute attacked the wall together with everything they had.

But it wasn’t supernatural concrete Blossom’s powered fists hit when she charged at the wall; rather, something soft and shrieking caved under her force, and she went careening out of control.

“Get _off_!” Brat wheezed, winded where Blossom had inadvertently punched her.

Blossom blinked, dazed and uncomprehending as her eyes adjusted to the sudden gloom of this space after the blinding white beneath the tree just in time to notice the wall open up behind Brat and spit out a concrete spire. Thoughtless, she rolled with Brat as hard as she could just before the spike could impale them both. Brat swore and finally shoved Blossom off. Beyond, a bright light shone through the portal Blossom had passed through into this place. Brute raged on the other side, and Buttercup was shouting.

 _They can’t see us_ , Blossom realized.

“Shit!” Brat’s scream was her only warning before the wall spat out a thick column straight at Blossom, and she was forced to fly away. Everywhere she looked, the walls exploded with concrete spires and rods, only to suck them back in. Her head spun, or maybe it was the room that was spinning. She was going to be sick in the middle of the single-most “What the fuck?” moment she had ever experienced.

And then, the creature attacked.

* * *

By the time Brick and Berserk arrived at the top of the stairs, it was a complete shit show as Buttercup and Brute shouted over each other and attacked the wall.

Brick brought his fingers to his mouth and whistled harshly. “ _What_ is going on?”

“Brat and Blossom got sucked into the wall, I think,” Boomer said, grim like he had a mind to join Buttercup and Brute kicking the wall like a pair of idiots.

“Really?” Berserk asked, like it was the most interesting thing she had heard all day. “How?”

“They just touched it, I don’t know!” Buttercup said. “Damnit. Butch, make me a shield.”

“Butch, do _not_ ,” Brick commanded, and Butch’s power fizzled out in his palms. Brick was rewarded for his levelheadedness with a face full of green.

“My sister is in there,” Brute said in a low charnel voice. “Put your dick away and help, or you’ll deal with me.”

Despite himself, Brick swallowed. He knew little of Brute except what Brat had told him in passing, but the threat she posed as long as Brat was missing was not one he desired to tempt. He sensed Berserk’s eyes on them like a thousand snakes crawling over his skin.

Bubbles pressed her ear to the weird not-a-doorway and gasped. “I think I hear them!”

Boomer and Buttercup both joined her at the wall and strained to listen. “Hey, are they fighting in there?” Boomer asked.

Buttercup turned her furious green eyes on Brick. “Fucking _do_ something!”

“Like what?” he snapped back.

“I don’t know, _think_! You’re supposed to be good at that!”

Before Brick could respond to such a juvenile plea, Berserk walked calmly by him and shoved Butch hard against the wall.

He disappeared through the concrete with a yelp.

Brick gaped at his counterpart, for once speechless. Berserk clapped her hands together and smirked at him. “And then there were three,” she said.

* * *

The metallic construct slithered around the undulating spikes like a tongue around masticating teeth. Its hooked appendages and long tail were well-suited to the slippery and constantly changing environment. Like the metallic automaton that had greeted them, Blossom suspected this construct was powered by the X that greased its many joints.

She and Brat tried hitting it with their blasters, but the beams hardly fazed it. Blossom’s X-ray vision revealed nothing of comfort, no beating heart or even a brain. It was truly a creation in every sense of the word, beholden to whatever force or power bade it move. By the time Butch stumbled into the pocket dimension—because Blossom could not reconcile this bizarre and interminable room truly existing on the same spatial plane as the rest of the House—Brat was smacked aside by a rushing column in an attempt to avoid the creature’s curved claw.

“Butch, shield!” Blossom commanded.

“What’re you—oof!” Brat landed on him, and he landed on what may or may not have been the floor.

“Now!” Blossom screamed at him as she kept an eye on the monster stalking them.

Butch obeyed and threw up a shield around Brat and himself, just in time to save them from the spike that erupted beneath them and hit them like a pool ball. Gerbils in a ball, they ping-ponged off the walls.

The construct opened its maw with a roar, and Blossom had no choice but to hope Butch and Brat could take care of themselves. She summoned her ice and let loose a devastating wave. It poured from her lungs and gathered in her hands until they could hold it no longer. As before when she first woke up on this strange planet, the power overwhelmed her, but overwhelming was what she needed right now.

The construct’s roar died in its throat where the ice filled it, and it staggered right into an oncoming column.

“Fuck you!” Brat’s shout echoed. “We could’ve died!”

“Fuck me? I saved you!” Butch shouted right back.

“Next time, don’t!”

Blossom found them no longer confined to Butch’s shield and floating opposite each other, banged up but thankfully alive.

“Enough!” Blossom said, and looked behind her to check for the construct. It was still struggling with the ice it had swallowed, but from the looks of it, it wouldn’t be long until the thing was chasing them again. “Listen, I don’t know what’s going on, but that thing is going to kill us unless we figure out a way past it.”

Butch sneered and smacked his fist into his open palm. Green power exploded around him, bigger than Blossom had ever seen from him. “I don’t get it, but if it’s a fight you want, leave it to me.”

“Yeah? Have fun, jarhead. I’m getting out of here,” Brat said.

“I don’t think any of us is getting out until we beat that thing,” Blossom said. “We’re going to have to work together.”

Brat flushed. “Like _hell_ —”

The construct rushed them all of a sudden, and Blossom took the brunt of the collision shielding Butch and Brat from harm. She hadn’t even though about it, just threw herself in front of them as if they were her sisters and this was another day in Townsville saving the world before bedtime.

But the pain of splitting her skull on concrete never came. Butch’s shield cushioned her collision at the last minute. A ringing head was far kinder than a broken one. When she looked up, Butch was attacking the construct all out, no surprise there. Brat, however, had landed beside Blossom as the shield dissolved and watched her with a look of utter contempt.

“Why would you jump in front of that thing for me? You think I can’t take care of myself?” Brat demanded.

Blossom gritted her teeth and got to her feet next to Brat. “I think we have to take care of each other if we want to escape with our lives.” She caught Brat’s eye and was surprised to find her quiet. “We can hash this out later if you really want, but for now, I really need your help. Deal?”

Brat looked away. Her fists were clenched tight enough to make diamonds. “Fine. How do we kill that thing?”

Blossom watched as the construct lashed out at Butch and retreated, as if trying to draw him in closer. She narrowed her eyes. “I don’t think that’s the goal of this trial.”

“Trial?”

“That’s what the automaton said, remember? That it’s here to oversee our trials.”

Butch caught one of the monster’s hooked appendages in a shield bubble before it could skewer him and clapped his hands together. The shield shrank and imploded on itself, and the creature howled in fury. Its limb had survived, but it was mutilated and useless.

“Oh, gross,” Brat said.

“Come on, I have an idea.” Blossom took off flying and intercepted Butch. “Hey, fly that way!”

“Huh?!” Butch looked at her like she had grown a second head.

“Just follow my lead!” Blossom whizzed past the construct’s head to get its attention, and it lurched after her. A wicked spike shot out of the wall above her, too close to avoid, so she grabbed it. Ice exploded from her hand, slicking her grip, and she slid fully around the pole and shot back the way she’d come even faster.

The construct didn’t follow her very far.

_That’s it!_

Brat and Butch flew in opposite directions, nothing but blue and green starbursts in this desolate grey pit, and the construct thrashed after them until they, too, led it too far. But too far from what?

“Butch, distract it!” Blossom ordered as she flew in close.

“What the hell does it look like I’m doing?” He grabbed the construct’s blocky tail and yanked back with all his might.

Blossom darted over new-made columns that popped up in her way like midmorning traffic. She stepped, and ice bloomed from her highly impractical shoes, sending her slipping and falling (or rising?). There was no telling up from down in this wonky place, but if she stopped moving that would be the end of her. Somewhere behind her, around her, the construct’s growling voice stalked her like a waking nightmare, and she could not ignore her mounting fear and paranoia that if she looked back it would be _right there_.

The pyramid she came across was the same bland concrete as everything else, but unlike the rest it didn’t grow or perish. It rose undaunted, three blank faces joined at a sharp zenith where an old skeleton key floated as if on invisible strings.

“Blossom!” Brat’s warning came just a second too late. A heavy limb swatted Blossom like a fly, and she went spinning. The pain and blinding white were almost enough to block out the sensation of crashing through a receding pillar. Her body reacted on pure survival instinct as she grappled for a handhold, anything to keep her from plummeting to her demise. Ice froze around her fingers, her wrists, up her arms. The whiplash hit her with the force of a speeding train, and if she wasn’t Super, she was sure her head may have snapped clean off.

When she looked up, she saw Brat smashing into the construct’s head, her blue light a blinding white that hurt to look at, and suddenly Butch was there.

“Shit, that’s a lot of ice,” he said as he wrapped his arms around Blossom’s middle and tried to pry her loose.

Blossom hissed in pain as her body was slow to heal the worst of it. “Butch, the key. We need to grab it.”

“Key? What’re you talking about?”

“It’s guarding a key, that’s why it won’t stray too far. Damnit.” Blossom’s ice cracked as Butch finally peeled her off the column, and the shards fell from her arms like broken glass.

“You’re fucking freezing,” Butch said.

“I’ll be fine. Where’s Brat—”

“Aaahhhh!!!” Brat’s scream was cut off as the construct caught her in its mouth and crunched down.

“Oh, fuck!” Butch took off, and Blossom was right behind him with ice in her palms and spite in her veins. A trial, huh? Someone wanted to see what they could do? She would damn well show them.

“Butch, shield now!” Blossom didn’t wait for his response as she channeled everything she had into a burst of sub zero power directly over the construct’s horned head. Her breath froze in her throat and the blood slowed to slush in her veins as the temperature in the pocket dimension plummeted to unbearable levels. Her eyelashes froze solid and her tongue fused to the floor of her mouth as she breathed out all her fear and fury—at being stuck in this place, at the pain in her skull, at the construct for daring to eat one of her own like it was anything other than some sick puppet controlled by a coward too weak and pathetic to face Blossom directly.

The creature’s movements slowed as Blossom’s ice engulfed its entire head and torso, and still she didn’t stop. “Now!” she commanded.

Butch, safely in his shield bubble, compressed the energy around his body like glowing green armor and launched himself at the thing’s jaws with a shout. He shattered its teeth and disappeared inside for the most frightening several seconds of Blossom’s life.

And then, light.

It dazzled through every crack in the construct’s hide, between its broken teeth and out through its hollow eyeball sockets. Silent as a distant dying star, the light flooded the space and Blossom too, and she was forced to cover her eyes or go mad with starblind.

“I can’t see,” Butch said. “Shit, is this permanent?”

“Relax,” Brat drawled, “you’re not dead. God.”

Blossom chanced a look, and while her eyes stung horribly and spots danced in the corners of her vision, she had avoided the worst of Brat’s overpowered flash attack. Blue light so bright it was almost white rose from Brat in fiery ribbons as she looked down on the creature that had nearly swallowed her whole. Her crop top was ripped and her hair was a mess, but the starlight in her eyes was very much alive.

“You’re okay,” Blossom said, the release of relief a tangible weight off her shoulders.

Brat looked at her very strangely then, as if she didn’t quite remember Blossom. “Yeah, sure.”

“The key,” Blossom said. “We have to get it. Are you both okay to keep fighting?”

“I am,” Brat said gravely. She crackled with blue power. “That thing won’t catch me again.”

Butch rubbed his eyes. “I’m gonna break that cement cocksucker in half, I swear to god.”

Blossom nodded. “I just need one minute.”

“Whatever,” Brat said. “Come on, jarhead.”

The construct, still reeling from Brat’s Starblind, was slow to react to Blossom streaking past it, avoiding spikes and spires that burst forth to hinder her path to the key. She left her paranoia behind in Brat’s and Butch’s capable fists as they worked together to harass the construct and buy Blossom the precious seconds she needed to find the central pyramid again. The key floated undisturbed, and the moment she snatched it, the room reconciled.

The walls quieted their violent outburst, undulating softly without any further intention to maim and maul. The construct froze mid-attack and melted in a black puddle, until there was nothing left of it. The room had recalled it to the walls, and the space was silent except for Blossom’s pounding heart.

Butch and Brat were waiting for her as she returned with the key. It was heavy but simple, dark metal with three wards and a black triangle emblazoned in the bow, just like the crest at the top of the stairs when Blossom had first entered Trinity House.

“All that work for this stupid thing?” Brat said, crossing her arms.

“What the fuck is going on?” Butch demanded, all pretenses gone.

Blossom shook her head as she looked between them. Battered and tired, they had nonetheless pulled through for her. She owed them her life. “I don’t know, but I’m going to find out. And then, we’re getting out of this horrible house.”

* * *

Between Brick and Buttercup, it was a close call for who might end up murdering Berserk. Boomer watched the two of them shout and threaten her to absolutely no avail.

“You’re insane, you know that?” Buttercup spat as Bubbles held her back.

“Buttercup, you have to calm down! This won’t help—”

“I’m not insane, I just pay attention,” Berserk shot back, entirely too at ease in her posture facing down a rampaging Buttercup. Boomer watched her curiously.

“Oh, good,” Brick said in his telltale murder voice. Heat shimmered from his shoulders. Someone was about to suffer. “Then you have a logical explanation for throwing my brother into a supernatural torture chamber. I’m dying to hear it.”

“The Rule of Three,” she said. “You heard that talking toaster. I just assumed that you, being such an _amazing leader_ , would have put two and two together already.”

That shut Brick up very fast.

“What are you talking about?” Brute demanded. “That’s our sister in there. Stop fucking around.”

Berserk narrowed her eyes and stiffened. There was no trace of her cruel smile as she locked eyes with Brute.

 _So you do feel something,_ Boomer thought to himself as he took in her defensive posture.

“Neither you nor Buttercup could get through,” Berserk said calmly. “Knowing that, the solution became pretty obvious.”

Brick was silent, and Buttercup had ceased her struggling. Boomer caught Bubbles’ wary eye.

“You think only Butch could have gone through?” Bubbles asked. “Why? You and Brick didn’t try breaching the wall.”

“Because Butch is a Green,” Brick answered for Berserk. His voice wavered just a little, just enough for Boomer to notice. “The Rule of Three…”

Berserk chuckled humorlessly. “He _can_ be taught.”

Boomer frowned. “You could’ve said something,” he said to Berserk. “Instead of pushing Butch in there all of a sudden, you could have told us your theory and avoided all this drama.”

Berserk’s magenta eyes glowed darkly in contrast to the bright overhead lights. His palms began to sweat under her undivided attention. “And waste time debating a hypothesis I already knew was cogent? From the sounds of the fight in there, Blossom and Brat needed all the help they could get as soon as possible. Or do you disagree?”

Boomer felt the others’ eyes on him as she put him on the spot. “No, I mean… I just meant—”

“I don’t know you well,” Berserk interrupted him, but she looked around at the whole group and addressed them all as one. “And I don’t care to get to know you better. But we’re stuck here together, and it would seem a bit of cooperation is required of us. So let’s get one thing straight: I’m not a big bad Rowdyruff or your righteous princess of power, but my blood’s just as Red as theirs.” Her eyes settled on Boomer once more, and he fought the urge to squirm as she appraised him like he was an unknown vintage she debated cracking open. “I know what the fuck I’m talking about.”

Boomer’s throat ran dry, and he didn’t know what to say to that. The uncomfortable moment didn’t last long, because the automaton that had greeted them materialized out of the floor in a sentient puddle of X and reformed right in front of Brute.

“Jesus Christ,” she said, violently stepping away from the thing and bumping into Brick, who shot her a dirty look.

“Congratulations, the first trial is now complete.” The automaton bowed low.

“You mean, Blossom and the others are okay?” Bubbles asked.

The automaton nodded to her. “Of course. They have passed the trial and will be returning shortly.”

As if on cue, the wall shimmered and changed. Where Butch and the girls had fallen through, an iron-wrought door emerged in the concrete and swung open.

“Brat.” Brute was at her battered sister’s side as soon as she emerged and checking her for injuries. A rip in her blue crop top drew Brute’s critical eye, but Brat put a hand on hers in a silent reassurance.

“Blossom!” Bubbles hugged her sister, and Buttercup was not far behind. “Oh my god, we were so worried!”

“What the hell happened?” Buttercup demanded. “We heard fighting.”

Blossom, battered but okay, hugged her sisters back and gently pushed them off. “We did fight. There was a creature, but we were able to beat it back together.”

“Hey, I’m okay too, just FYI,” Butch said.

“Yeah, yeah, congratulations,” Buttercup said. She punched him lightly in the arm.

Boomer grabbed his shoulder and squeezed affectionately. “Well, _I’m_ glad you’re okay.”

“What creature?” Brick asked, looking right at Blossom.

Blossom frosted over, and Butch shrugged Boomer off. “Just some alien asshole. We beat it, and Blossom grabbed the key, easy,” he said.

Blossom produced the key in question, and Brick materialized in front of her to examine it. “A key?” He held out his hand to take it, but Blossom didn’t hand it over.

“We went to a lot of trouble to get this,” she said, clutching the large iron key to her chest.

Brick’s red eyes lingered on the mysterious prize. “I can see that.”

“Oh, please,” Berserk said. Boomer looked around and found her alone leaning on the wall closest to her sisters, but she didn’t appear interested in them at all as she watched Brick and Blossom. “Hey, toaster,” she called to the automaton. “They did your little trial. It’s time for some answers.”

The automaton did not take offense, probably because it was an unfeeling machine. “Of course. Congratulations again on completing your first trial. You have obtained a Challenge Room Key, which you can use at your leisure. Please hold onto it, as there are no copies.”

“Challenge Room Key?” Brat said. “You mean, like, there’s more?”

“Yes. Each key unlocks a new door and a new challenge.”

“Let me guess,” Brick said. “Collect them all, and we unlock the mystery of Trinity House.”

“Precisely,” the automaton said.

“Uh-huh.” Brick glared bored murder at the automaton.

Buttercup got in the automaton’s face, blazing green. “Why did only Blossom, Brat, and Butch go in?”

“Because they were the only ones who could,” Berserk said. “The Rule of Three, right?”

The automaton nodded. “That is correct. Only three may challenge a trial.”

“One of each color,” Blossom said grimly.

“I’m a Green, not a Blue,” Brute said. “I should have been able to follow Brat inside.”

“That’s true. Buttercup wasn’t allowed in either,” Boomer said. “Why only Butch?”

“You are her sibling,” the automaton said to Brute. “It is an imperfect match.”

“So you mean…” Boomer trailed off, understanding dawning.

“We can’t fight alongside our siblings,” Brick said, and Boomer looked at him, unable to conceal his distress.

“Which means our teams are already decided,” Berserk said, her eyes lingering on Boomer.

“What are you…” Buttercup trailed off as she looked between Brick and Berserk. “No way, fuck that. I’m _not_ working with this psycho.”

“Buttercup,” Blossom said.

“I said _no_!”

“You have to,” Brick said. “If the sibling rule is real and Blossom’s team is already decided, then you have to work with Berserk. You and Boomer both.”

“I don’t like this rule,” Brute said darkly.

 _Me neither_ , Boomer thought to himself as he looked between a seething Buttercup and an alarmingly quiet Berserk. Buttercup was a friend, but with Berserk in the mix, could he count on either of them to work together against the bigger threat and keep each other safe? Or was he marching to the gallows arm in arm with them?

“Dinner will be served in one hour,” the automaton said. “I will show you to your rooms. Please follow me.”

Boomer had completely forgotten about his appetite, but the mention of food made his stomach rumble. The last thing he’d eaten had been a handful of almonds back at B-3, the bar he owned and operated in Citiesville. That was right before a sickly customer staggered to the bathroom and Boomer followed him, worried he might need help, only to be attacked and knocked out and wake up on a foreign planet…

_Oh my god, I’ve been abducted by aliens._

He wrung his sweaty hands. Brick drew up next to him, and Boomer realized they were at the back of the group, which had followed the automaton down the stairs.

“You good?” Brick asked softly as they fell into step together.

“Oh yeah, I love it here,” Boomer said flatly.

“Listen, you, me, and Butch will talk when it’s just us in our room.”

Boomer let out the breath he’d been holding. Brick stayed level with him, and it was too tempting not to indulge in his support when he was offering. “This is crazy. Butch went through a _wall_ , Brick.”

“I know. I’m going to figure this out. We’re getting off this planet.”

Brick’s reassurance, as hollow as it was considering he was just as stuck here as Boomer, nonetheless calmed him. At least he had his brothers here with him, right? Together, they were unstoppable, a real team…

Boomer’s eyes landed on Buttercup walking ahead with Blossom on one side and Butch on the other. She was arguing with Butch about something.

_A team, huh?_

Something told him he was going to have to pull more than his own weight to make it work with Berserk and her.

“Do me a favor and figure it out fast,” Boomer said.

Brick looked grimly ahead at the rest of the group, and Boomer wondered what bothered him more: being in close quarters with his estranged counterparts or the prospect of leading a team with Bubbles and Brute as his unwilling backup.

“The Red Wing is just through these doors,” the automaton addressed Blossom.

“The Red Wing?” Blossom asked. “Wait, you don’t mean—”

“Ouch!” Bubbles yelped, and Boomer dashed to her side as she clutched her wrist and the silver bangle she’d woken up with. “It’s burning me!”

“Please back away from the doors,” the automaton said unhurriedly.

Boomer pulled Bubbles back, and immediately she stopped squirming. He touched the bangle on her wrist, but it was cool to the touch, harmless.

When Brick approached the red lacquered double doors carved in the shape of a triangle, they opened for him automatically. Inside, a short corridor lit up and led to a common space furnished with red sofas, a red rug, and a glass coffee table. Deeper inside, three doors opened up to three separate bedrooms. A concrete top bar ran along the length of one wall, and a staircase disappeared through the back wall to a floor below.

“Great,” Brick said, anything but.

“This can’t be right,” Blossom said. “I would prefer to share a room with my sisters.”

“Same,” Buttercup said. “You already mixed up our teams. We’re not a fucking Twister color wheel you can spin however you want.”

“Your colors signify your alignment in the Rule of Three,” the automaton explained. “Red represents the mind, the house of higher thought and reason. There is no place for you in the Red Wing.”

“Motherfucker—”

Before Buttercup could do something totally useless like punch the unbreakable robot, Brute grabbed her wrist and stopped her. “Waste of energy.”

The cousins glared at each other for a beat, and Buttercup yanked her hand free. Boomer watched them, unable to help his curiosity. What had caused them to dislike each other so much?

Berserk seemed to have no qualms about her sleeping arrangements and skipped through the threshold like a honeymooner on vacation. “Is this bar stocked?” she called.

“It fucking better be,” Brick grumbled, following after her.

Blossom squeezed her sisters’ hands. “We’ll figure this out.”

Boomer watched their parting, and it only just now hit him as Blossom followed her counterparts: he would have to share a room with Bubbles and…

“I’m not going in there,” Brat said when the automaton moved across the hall to another set of triangular doors lacquered a deep dark blue.

Bubbles sighed. “I don’t think we have much choice, Brat.”

“Whatever, Brute and I can just stay somewhere else.” There was an edge to her tone that sounded almost worried, afraid even.

“The House will not allow alternative accommodations,” the automaton said.

“Why the hell not? I did your stupid trial, so I should get to sleep wherever I want.”

“Because the Rule of Three—”

“Is law, blah blah,” Buttercup cut in. “We heard you the first time.”

Boomer decided to cut this short and headed for the doors. As for Brick before him, these opened automatically. “So, uh, I’m going to guess this is the Blue Wing?”

“That is correct,” the automaton said. “Blue represents the spirit, the house of dreams and the hidden world.”

Boomer forced a laugh. “Nothing ominous about that at all…”

Bubbles offered her cousin a sympathetic smile. “It’s okay, Brat. Brute will be just over there, see?” She pointed to the final set of triangular doors appropriately lacquered in a green so dark it was nearly black.

Brat rolled her eyes and shoved roughly past Bubbles and Boomer both. “Whatever, let’s just get this over with. I call biggest room.”

Bubbles shook her head and followed her cousin inside. Boomer exchanged a last look with Butch, who shrugged.

“Good luck,” he said super unhelpfully. Boomer flipped him the bird.

“And through here is the Green Wing,” the automaton said.

Boomer left them to it and followed Bubbles and Brat deeper into what would be their shared living space for who knew how long. God, he hoped Brat didn’t make this more difficult than it already was—

“You’ve _got_ to be kidding me!” Brat screeched.

Boomer dashed to the living room, which was in the same Brutalist angles and stocked with blue furniture in keeping with the theme. However, unlike the Red Wing, there were no doors leading to separate bedrooms. Aside from a single glass bathroom partially tucked behind a concrete half wall for privacy, the three beds sat together against the far wall. There was space for dividing walls and doors, but the architect had decided not to include them.

“Oh, shit,” Boomer said.

“Understatement,” Brat said. She lifted up the nearest bed and floated it into a corner as far away from the other two as possible. “This is officially my space, and I don’t want either of you in it.”

“Brat, that’s really not necessary,” Bubbles began.

Brat suddenly materialized in her face. She looked _pissed_. “Listen, _Bubbly_. I’ve been abducted literally off the face of the Earth and dropped in this creepy circus house with no way to even let my Insta followers know. They probably think I’m dead, or worse, a total flake. I just fought a weird alien cement monster and almost got _eaten_. This top is Karl Lagerfeld and it’s completely ruined, look at it!” She pulled at the tear in her top and unfortunately made it worse. “And worst of all, I’m stuck here with the two of you _without even a place to change my clothes in private_ , so don’t tell me what’s _necessary_.”

“Okay, that’s enough.” Boomer tried to get in between them, but Bubbles stopped him with a hand in his face before he could grab them.

“Are you finished?” she said. “Because you can have the first shower if you want. We only have an hour until that automaton comes back for dinner.”

Brat turned up her nose. “Whatever. Don’t come in the bathroom until I’m done.”

She stalked off to the bathroom, and Boomer watched her go. Bubbles’ shoulders slumped, and she fell back onto a blue sofa.

“She shouldn’t talk to you like that,” Boomer said lowly so that Brat wouldn’t hear them over the sound of the shower.

“I know,” Bubbles said. She sounded tired, like she’d been awake for too long.

“If she does it again, I’m not letting it go.”

Bubbles looked at him long and hard, and he fought not to fidget. It had been a long time since he had her full attention for so long without any distractions. “Well, let’s try to get along. Something tells me we’re going to be here for a while.”

Boomer wondered about all she didn’t say, the work and energy she was asking him for, and found that he could do nothing but nod dejectedly. Like it or not, they were here together, and that was no one’s fault, not even Brat’s. Making the best of it seemed like the only sane option, but with privacy stripped away from them and not even the comfort of his brothers nearby, Boomer had never felt so naked and afraid.

Bubbles’ hand in his startled him out of his depressing thoughts. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “I don’t think I could do this without you.”

Boomer glanced at the bathroom half wall. Steam rose from the shower behind it into a slatted vent in the concrete ceiling. “Back at you.”

If he had to be stranded on an alien planet in a possibly haunted house full of monsters and secret keys, the woman he cherished most in the world was not the worst companion he could ask for.

Bubbles twirled her golden wedding band around her finger, and Boomer sighed. He sat down next to her on the fluffy sofa and nudged her arm with his. “I’m sure Robin’s okay,” he whispered. “She’s probably already trying to find a way to save us, knowing her.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Bubbles said, so softly he had to strain to hear her. “What will she find if she comes looking?”

A chill ran down Boomer’s spine. He had no answers for her, no way of knowing what Robin and the Professor and anyone else who might come looking for them might encounter along the way.

And maybe, for now, it was better not knowing.

* * *

High up in the Townsville Observatory, Mojo Jojo sat at his simple kitchen table over a plate of perfectly poached eggs, bacon, and exactly one slice of wheat toast cut into right triangles. A glass of orange juice, freshly squeezed, sat on a coaster to his right, and the morning paper just retrieved from the stoop at the bottom of the volcano-top Observatory sat to his left. It was quiet, a balmy summer morning, too early for families with their annoying children to arrive at the park and start screaming and running in pointless circles for fun.

Mojo folded his pink apron and tucked it away in the cabinet above the kitchen sink, where his used dishes were neatly stacked and waiting to be washed after breakfast. He washed his paws, dried them on a dish towel, and settled into the chair at the head of the table to enjoy his freshly cooked breakfast.

The first bite was heaven—the crunchy bacon just shy of burned, the yolk that ran just enough to soak a corner of toast, and the long sip of tart juice to wash it all down, oh! Was there ever a more perfect 6 a.m. start to a Friday? No, there most certainly was not, as he had just declared it so.

He cleared his throat and pressed his fork into the fluffy egg for a second bite when a shrill alarm blared and startled him so badly, he dropped the fork on the floor. “Curses!”

In his surprise, he had flung the second bite of egg awry, and it landed on the floor in a sopping yellow lump near the fork. The alarm continued to ring, and he realized it was no alarm at all, but rather that accursed cell phone he had been tricked into purchasing for a much too exorbitant price. Grumbling to himself, Mojo cast a scathing glare at the fallen bit of egg on his floor—he would need to polish that tile before the grease stained—and retrieved the blasted phone from the kitchen counter, where it sat charging.

“Unknown number?” he said, instantly suspicious. Who had discerned his private number? Impossible. This must be a prank. He answered the call. “Good morning. Who are you and why have you called me, Mojo Jojo, from a telephone number which is unknown and therefore impossible to return dial like a coward—”

“Mojo, cool it! It’s Princess Morbucks. And what do you mean my number’s unknown? I’m definitely in your contacts.”

Mojo’s face fell. “You most certainly are not. There are exactly three people in my contacts list, of which you are not one. I should know, for I deleted your phone number many months ago—”

“Oh god, _whatever_. Look, have you heard from Brick at all?”

Mojo curled his lip at her second interruption in as many minutes. “Oh, I’m sorry, I did not realize I am now employed as my son’s personal secretary. Allow me to take a message.”

He could practically hear her roll her eyes over the line. In the background, people spoke in low voices, as if she were making her way through a crowded area. “Jesus Christ. And he wonders where he gets his drama from.”

“Now look here—”

A loud horn like a trumpet cut him off, followed by Princess shouting quite a few words that made Mojo blush. “Goddamnit,” she muttered when the commotion passed. “Fucking New York City subway mariachis.”

Mojo had no desire to continue this asinine conversation. “Princess, I have no desire to continue this asinine conversation, so I will be hanging up the telephone now, which is to say, immediately and without further delay—”

“Wait!” she screamed in his ear, and he nearly dropped the phone to spare his eardrum. “You didn’t answer me. Have you seen or heard from Brick at all in the last twenty-four hours?”

Mojo growled through his teeth. “No, I have not seen that disobedient boy in twenty-four hours, or forty-eight hours, or seventy-two hours, or—”

“Okay, Christ, I get the picture,” she interrupted him _again_. “What about Boomer or Butch? Any word from them?”

Mojo was about to lose his temper with her, but the inquiry gave him pause. He wandered through the kitchen to the lab on the second floor automatically. “No, I have not seen nor heard from any of my former sons lately. What is this about?”

When he reached the lab, he turned on the overhead floodlights and took a seat at the massive supercomputer that took up the majority of one wall. A retina scan logged him on in a matter of seconds.

“Brick was supposed to be here with me to hear a client pitch,” Princess said. “He never misses work without any explanation. I tried his apartment security in Citiesville, but no one’s seen him. And I can’t get ahold of his brothers, either. Something’s wrong, like they just disappeared off the face of the Earth.”

Mojo put her on speaker and set the phone aside so he could boot up his CCTV access. Since the Boys began their schooling, Mojo had hacked into CCTV all over Townsville and Citiesville to keep an eye on them in case they tried to cut class and cause trouble without his explicit sanction. It took only moments to access the footage from the street in front of Brick’s apartment building and pull up the last day.

“Mojo? Hello? You better not have hung up on me!” Princess said.

“Quiet your voice!” Mojo snapped. “I am searching the street footage… There he is.” There Brick was, entering his apartment two days ago in the evening. He fast forwarded through footage of others coming and going, but paused when the camera caught a petite woman shouldering a body much larger than hers. Most suspicious of all was the heavy trench coat the other body wore. Summers in Citiesville were not hot, but they did not merit a heavy jacket with a hood.

Mojo switched cameras to footage of B-3, the bar where Boomer worked. A similar escort popped up on the footage within minutes of the footage at Brick’s apartment. A drunk patron being escorted out? Or something more sinister? Mojo frowned deeply and looked up Butch’s address.

“Well? Did you find him? Is he okay?” Princess demanded.

“No, I…” Mojo trailed off as he stared at the footage from Butch’s apartment. A lone figure struggled to shoulder two unconscious bodies, only one of which was covered. As if they hadn’t been expecting two occupants. Mojo frosted over as he stared at Buttercup’s familiar face, passed out and dangling over her abductor’s shoulder next to Butch.

“Mojo, I swear to god, I’m flying back to Townsville this morning and I will _personally_ have your Observatory blown up if you don’t answer me!”

Mojo barely registered her rudeness as he replayed the footage from Butch’s apartment over and over. “I found them,” he said.

“Them? Like, all three of them? What’s going on?”

“I do not know.” Buttercup’s face froze on the monitor, blown up to scale and sour as ever even passed out. He’d know her face anywhere. “But I know who to ask to find out.”

Breakfast grew cold in the kitchen, and the spilled egg dried and crusted on the pristine tile floor, forgotten.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I flirted for a hot second with the “and there was only one bed!” trope, but I have to maintain some self-respect here…for now.
> 
> Next time: Our heroes adjust to their new lives in an inter-dimensional haunted house. It does not go very well. Meanwhile, Robin and Professor Utonium receive even more unwelcome visitors.


	3. An Immaculate Devouring

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay here! I had a pretty brutal month of work and didn’t get to write anything for weeks since the last update. I hope you enjoy this update!

Blossom woke naturally with the sun’s first light streaming through her stained glass window. Last night’s nerves were still frayed at the edges as a bone-weary exhaustion leadened her limbs. Nonetheless, she sat up and stretched her arms above her head with a yawn. Her solitary room was quiet, but not in a peaceful sense. If Brick and Berserk were up yet, they were being sneaky about it. The walls were thin, as she had learned last night courtesy of the short-lived but vituperative shouting match the two of them had gotten into over a broken glass that became the unfortunate hair trigger for their mutual exasperation over being stuck in close quarters together. Deciding it was not her responsibility to play mediator for two people she didn’t even like, Blossom had turned in early.

She tossed her red mane over her shoulder and opened up the chest of clothes that had already been here when she’d arrived. She’d always favored red, but having nothing else to wear out of the selection provided to her dampened the appeal. She shed her red sleep shirt and shorts and pulled on a pair of leggings, a sleeveless top, and a jacket over it, all in the same dark red dye. They fit her surprisingly well, as if they’d been tailored to her exact size. The Challenge Room Key she’d kept sat on the nightstand next to her bed, so she slipped that in her jacket pocket for safekeeping, not trusting it out of her sight. A pair of red boots waited by the door to her room, and she slipped them on before heading out to the suite’s lone bathroom off the common room.

Berserk was already in there fixing her hair. She side-eyed Blossom like she’d caught a bad whiff of morning breath. “I see our designers shopped at the same clearance sale.”

Aside from the jacket, which Berserk had forgone, they were all but identical in form-fitting red and matching high ponytails. But the magenta glow of her cousin’s cutting stare could have drawn blood from stone. Blossom ran the sink to brush her teeth. “What do you make of all this?”

Berserk shifted her suspicious judgment to Blossom’s toothbrush. “Not much. Why, you know something I don’t?”

Blossom rinsed her mouth. “Unfortunately, no.” She watched as Berserk messed with her bangs in the mirror. It had been so long since Blossom had seen her estranged counterpart, and she couldn’t help her curiosity. “You know, since we’re stuck here together, I thought maybe we could try working together to figure this out.”

“Uh-huh.” Berserk checked her profile, distracted.

“I’m serious. I know you and I have our differences, but between you, me, and Brick we can—”

The door opened then, and Brick entered wearing only a pair of red pants and tousled bed head. “Heard my name,” he said, irritable, or maybe just tired.

Blossom lost her train of thought as she gaped at him just standing there like he owned the place.

Behind her, Berserk snorted. “Séance over, begone demon.”

Brick soured even further. “It’s too early for you to be talking.” He retrieved his toothbrush from the cup the three of them now shared like roommates in a mental asylum.

“It’s too early for any of this,” Blossom said sternly, averting her gaze from Brick’s well-maintained arms.

She felt his lurid gaze on her profile as he brushed his teeth. Bravely, she took a keen interest in the freckles in her reflection.

Berserk chuckled and breezed past Blossom to leave, but she poked Brick in the stomach and he almost swallowed his toothbrush with a choked expletive. “And I half expected you to pop like a cheap blow-up doll.” Wicked magenta caught Blossom’s gaze in the mirror, and unable to help herself, Blossom flushed. “Put a shirt on. Nobody wants to see that.”

Berserk slithered out of the bathroom with an echoed laugh.

Brick spat foam in the sink. “Blow me,” he snapped back.

“Not if you were the last dick on the planet,” Berserk sang from the common room.

Blossom hastily stashed her towel to follow Berserk. It was entirely too crowded in here. “Excuse me.”

Brick muttered something probably offensive under this breath as Blossom all but flooded into the common room out of his immediate vicinity. Berserk was at the bar checking the cabinets. “Where the fuck did he put the whiskey last night?”

“A little early for that, isn’t it?” Blossom asked.

Berserk shot her a pointed look. “I need it to bleach my eyes.”

Blossom rolled her eyes. Berserk seemed to have an answer for everything. Best not to dig this hole any deeper.

The common area was tidy despite last night’s drinking extravaganza. Blossom couldn’t imagine Berserk cleaning anything, but the thought of Brick having done it was almost as ludicrous. Even so, the couch cushions were fluffed, all used glasses were put away, and the counter had been wiped down. Blossom ran her hand along the glossy concrete bar top, but her fingers came away smooth.

At the end of the bar was a narrow stairway winding down to the floor below. She peered down it. “It’s a dead end,” Brick said, cleaned up and mercifully fully clothed. Like Blossom, he’d opted for a red jacket over his shirt and had rolled up the sleeves to the elbows. “I checked last night.”

Berserk leaned over the bar. “Detective Blossy on the case. Look at her go.”

Blossom shot her pestiferous cousin a sharp look. “Don’t call me that.” Even so, she gazed at the stairs. Why would anyone build a staircase to nowhere? It didn’t make any sense.

Berserk just giggled and hopped over the bar in a magenta flourish. “Well? We’re not just taking his word for it, are we?”

Blossom ignored her and descended the steps.

“For fuck’s sake,” Brick muttered.

Blossom rounded the corner in the stairwell and landed in a narrow corridor illuminated by simple wall sconces. Her spirits sank as she approached the other end, which was nothing but a solid wall, just as Brick had said.

Berserk’s footsteps skipped along behind her. “Huh. And here I thought he was just fucking with us.”

 _So did I_ , Blossom would have said if she hadn’t forgotten what words were the moment the wall began to shift right before her eyes.

“I told you,” Brick said, his footsteps descending the stairs to join them. “There’s nothing down here…”

He trailed off in a stupor as the formerly solid wall finished undulating and reformed in the shape of an ornate door.

“How drunk were you last night?” Berserk asked.

“Not drunk enough.” Brick’s approach brought a rush of warmth with him, and Blossom shivered at his proximity. “What’s different?”

Blossom’s gaze fell to the large keyhole above the knob, and her pulse began to pound. “Me.” She reached into her jacket pocket. “I have the key.” It fit snugly in the keyhole with a click, and then it melted out of Blossom’s hand to absorb into the door. “Whoa…”

“Well? Open it already,” Berserk said, crowding closer to get a better look.

Brick did the honors, and Berserk shoved Blossom through the door with her. Blossom didn’t have the energy to protest when the sight that awaited them stole her breath away.

Books bound in red leather and etched in gold were stacked from floor to vertiginous ceiling. Shelves lined up like pews in the back half of the room and culminated at the altar of an obsidian pyramid with three faces that peaked taller than Blossom. There was one communal table for reading under hanging lights that flickered on as the three Supers stepped inside the hidden cache.

“This is incredible,” Blossom said.

Brick had selected a book from the nearest shelf and read the title aloud: “ _Mating Dances of the Martian Fire Slug_.”

Berserk made a face. “Gross.”

“Did you say Martian?” Blossom floated to his side to examine the book he’d selected.

Brick passed her the book and picked another one. “Looks like this section is all about intergalactic vermin sex.” He chuckled and showed Blossom the latest book he’d picked. “Got a thing for Andromedan Basilisks? This says they have fifteen-foot spiked hemipenes.”

“Thanks, I was in need of new nightmare fodder.” Blossom put the Basilisk book back in its slot with a little too much force.

“Stop projecting, Brick,” Berserk quipped. “Hey, the history section’s over here.”

Brick miraculously didn’t snap back at Berserk, and Blossom trailed after him to the section Berserk was perusing.

Blossom ran her fingers down the red spine of a book, identical to all the others. “There’s so much here.” Perhaps the answers to where in the universe they were and for what purpose would reveal themselves in one of the hundreds of books here.

Brick glared suddenly at the daunting bookshelf. “I wonder why we’re able to read these alien books.”

Berserk snapped shut the book she’d been browsing, her face grim. “Good question.”

_Very good question._

Blossom retracted her hand from the spines as though they had burned her fingertips. “I wonder what our metallic host would have to say about that?”

“Hm, who wants breakfast?” Berserk was already on her way back to the door on a mission.

Blossom’s gaze was inevitably drawn to Brick’s. If she could read thoughts, she was sure his would be as grim as hers right now. And like it or not, they were in this together. “Wait up.”

Brick’s gaze was as heavy as gravity on her back as they filed out of the library after Berserk, burdened with more questions than answers.

* * *

After a night of too much pity partying and too little sleep in the military-style barracks that was the Green Wing, Buttercup was ready for a hot breakfast and the company of her sisters.

“I feel like there’s somethin’ weird about these clothes.” Butch pulled back the collar of Buttercup’s green jacket and sniffed it.

She poked his cheek. “Beats the damp sweatpants I was wearing yesterday.”

Brute led the charge to the mess hall where they had dined last night. From the back, she was nearly indistinguishable from Butch dressed entirely in green and flaunting the same styled undercut, except for the couple inches of height she had over him. “No argument there.”

Buttercup rolled her eyes. She was not starting the morning by letting her laconic cousin get under her skin in three words or less. Not before she wolfed down her bodyweight in eggs and bacon, at least.

“It’s like they breathe with me,” Butch said. He rubbed the hem of his green muscle tank between his fingers.

“We can ask the toaster for the tailor’s number if it means that much to you,” Buttercup said.

No sooner had she said the words than the automaton in question appeared to welcome them to the mess hall. Bubbles and Boomer were already there sitting together at one end of the community table, while Brat had chosen the seat farthest from them at the other end. The minute she spotted Brute, she materialized in front of her in a blur of blue.

“ _Finally_. Did you sleep in or something?” she demanded.

“A little.” Brute folded back the popped collar on Brat’s blue jacket and smiled a little. Which may have been kind of a nice moment if Brat didn’t turn her prissy glare on Buttercup and Butch like they had just kicked her Pomeranian.

“Welcome,” the automaton said. “Please be seated for the morning meal.”

Buttercup made a beeline for Bubbles and slid in next to her. Butch followed, but Brute stayed with Brat at the ass-end of the table. Good, let them self-segregate if they wanted. “Fuck, I’m starving,” Buttercup said.

“Dude, come on.” Boomer snatched his plate out of Butch’s reach after Butch stole a slice of toast without asking.

“Please do eat your fills.” The automaton placed two plates of hot food in front of Buttercup and Butch. They didn’t need to be told twice.

“What was your room like?” Bubbles asked once the automaton had left them alone.

“Ours was awful,” Boomer said as he sipped on something hot and brown that Buttercup hoped was coffee.

“Eh,” Butch said through a mouthful of food.

“Weird,” Buttercup agreed.

Bubbles and Boomer exchanged a look that may have interested Buttercup more if she wasn’t so focused on stuffing her face with blessed calories.

“Did you guys have any privacy?” Boomer asked.

Buttercup choked and looked right at him. “Privacy for _what_?”

“The Blue Wing is just one room,” Bubbles said. “Brat wasn’t too happy about that.”

Boomer rolled his eyes. “Understatement.”

Buttercup looked over at her cousins eating quietly together. They were whispering about something too faintly for her to pick up on and completely ignoring this side of the table like it was middle school lunch period.

“Good morning—” The automaton abruptly cut off when Berserk grabbed it by the head and smashed it into the nearest wall.

“Hey, toaster,” she drawled. The concrete wall cracked under her brute force.

Buttercup and Boomer both leaped to their feet at the sudden violence so early in the morning, but they both faltered when the temperature in the room rose a few degrees as Brick, silently seething, sidled up next to his counterpart. “We found the library.”

“What library?” Brat demanded.

“The one hidden under the Red Wing.” Blossom strolled into the mess hall cool as a pack of frozen peas. “The Challenge Room Key revealed the door and unlocked it.”

“Congratulations,” the automaton said, ever monotone and unbothered being smashed against a wall. “It is a Red Wing exclusive privilege to patronize the Trinity House Library.”

“Hey, pause.” Buttercup approached her eldest sister. “What library?”

“The one full of books we can somehow read,” Berserk said. The more Brick burned next to her, the more her crushing fist also shimmered with heat, as though she were channeling his edgy smolder through a direct line.

“The aliens write in our language?” Bubbles asked. “How?”

“Sourcery, of course,” the automaton said.

“That word again.” Blossom paced around Brick to Berserk’s other side, deep in thought. “You called us Sourcerers when we arrived. What does that mean?”

“One who manipulates Source, as you do.”

“You mean, Chemical X,” Brick said, more statement than question. “It’s in the fucking air…”

“It is in all things,” the automaton said. “Source is life.”

Berserk pushed harder, and the crack in the wall groaned as it expanded. “Not where you’re standing, it’s not.”

“So we can read the books in the library because they’re written in ink containing Chemical X—I mean, Source?” Blossom deduced. “That’s incredible. Is the House made from Source too?”

“Source is in all things,” the automaton repeated. “Source is life.”

Butch snapped his fingers. “Oh shit, it’s in our clothes! I knew these threads felt weird.”

Buttercup was no scientist, but even she couldn’t help her fascination at the idea that Chemical X could infuse everything in this place, including the clothes on her back. As if to demonstrate the point, Berserk released the automaton, and as soon as she did, the crack in the wall began to knit back together as if it had never been there at all. As if…

“This House is alive,” Berserk said.

Buttercup could not help the stab to her gut that tickled like fear. With all the excitement and frustration of her abduction and adjustment to close quarters with Brute, of all people, she had forgotten to be properly terrified of her strange situation.

“May I offer you sustenance?” the automaton asked the Reds.

With little choice, they sat for their meal, but dining was the last thing on anybody’s mind.

“Butch,” Blossom said, “I’d like our team to train together today. If we have to face another Challenge Room, I want us to be in the best shape possible.”

Butch smirked. “Sure. You gonna make me call you Leader Girl too?”

“No.” Buttercup threw a bit of food at him across the table, which he caught in his mouth like the circus animal he was. She bit her lip not to return his self-satisfied grin.

Bubbles perked up. “That’s a good idea. Brick, maybe we should do that too.”

“Pass.” Brick downed the rest of his fake coffee and got up. “I’m checking out the library. It’s our best chance of getting answers and finding a way out of this place.”

Blossom got up. “I agree that we should study the library, but we also need to adjust to these new teams. What if you get thrown into a Challenge Room next?”

Brick didn’t so much as spare her a glance. “Then I’ll handle it.”

Berserk chuckled. “Sure you will.”

Buttercup’s blood pressure spiked and her instincts screamed the moment she saw Brick’s body tense and explode with concentrated heat. A fiery punch exploded from his palm, but Berserk caught it in her bare hand and donned it like a corsage on Prom night. Brick’s poisonous eyes narrowed in quiet fury.

“Sourcerers, huh?” Berserk mused as she literally played with fire. “I wonder what other secrets I’ll find within these walls.”

“Knock yourself out, _really_.” Brick left without another word, and it was probably for the best.

“Brat?” Blossom said, her tone curt. “Will you please come and train with Butch and me?”

Brat rolled her eyes. “We already did our challenge, so who cares?”

“I care. You were pulled into the Challenge Room accidentally, right? What if that were to happen again? We need to be prepared—”

“Blah, blah, blah.” Berserk slipped out of her chair and snuffed out Brick’s fire in her fist. “Have fun with your little play date. I’m out.”

Buttercup scoffed. _Good riddance._

To her surprise, Boomer shot out of his chair and caught Berserk’s wrist before she could leave. “Hey, Blossom has a point. If we’re supposed to be a team, then we should start acting like it.”

Berserk looked down at her captured wrist, but she didn’t pull free. “Sure, lesson number one: I’m the leader, and what I say goes.”

Brat giggled at that, but when Berserk turned to look at her, she immediately shut up.

Buttercup got up. “Leave her, Boomer. She can’t hack it, so she won’t even try.”

This time, Berserk was the one to laugh. “It’s cute how you think your opinion matters.”

“It’s cute how _you_ think you’re not in the same boat as the rest of us, trapped in this freak palace.”

That hit a nerve. Berserk pulled her wrist from Boomer’s grip and fixed her eerie eyes on Buttercup. Maybe it would have made her reconsider if this was a confrontation fifteen years ago with nothing to lose but pride. But they were not children anymore, and Buttercup was too pissed off to take this selfish asshole seriously.

“Forgive me,” Berserk said, not sorry at all, “I keep forgetting my audience. Let me dumb it down for you. This freak palace? It’s hiding monsters, surprise Challenge Rooms, and who knows what else. I know this is a foreign concept to you, but knowledge is power. So while you’re playing pin the tail on the dumbass, I’m going to scour every inch of this House and find where the bodies are buried. But please, _do_ go on about how I can’t hack it.”

“Son of a—”

Blossom grabbed Buttercup before she could punch Berserk. Ice bloomed where she’d caught Buttercup’s arms, burning cold through her jacket. “Enough,” she commanded. Before Buttercup could protest, Blossom turned on Berserk. “Speak to my sister like that again and you’ll deal with me. Clear?”

Berserk’s lips curled in a saccharine smile. “As my complexion.”

Buttercup growled as she pulled out of Blossom’s hold. Back at the ass-end of the table, Brute had jumped to her feet, taut as a bow string and fixated on Buttercup’s latent threat, while Brat stared with laser focus at her half-finished plate. It was too fucking claustrophobic in here all of a sudden.

“If you’re exploring the House, you shouldn’t go alone. It’s too dangerous,” Boomer said calmly. “I’ll go with you. Buttercup?”

“Over my dead body,” Buttercup snapped.

Berserk’s smug smile boiled her blood, but she had no snide remarks left for Buttercup and simply turned on her heel. “Have fun, kiddos.”

Boomer cast a last look back at Buttercup and then at Butch before he reluctantly followed Berserk out.

As soon as they were gone, the atmosphere became safe to breathe again. Blossom’s ice melted on Buttercup’s jacket like it had never been there at all, and not even a mark remained. The last Red looked around at those who remained and sighed. “Let’s head outside. There will be plenty of room to train there. Brute, you’re more than welcome to join along with Buttercup and Bubbles. We may as well use our time wisely.”

* * *

Berserk had a stray following her, and it was almost cute until he started yapping.

“This place is huge,” Boomer said. “Like, _unreasonably_ huge.”

He wasn’t wrong. Berserk led him upstairs to a balcony that overlooked the black sea. The sun was high in the sky that stretched on for miles, yet remained unreachable beyond the AX barrier that trapped them here. “I think we left reason back on Earth.”

“I’ll say.”

As Berserk crossed the expansive balcony, she ran her hand along the smooth steel railing. Below off the garden, Blossom had gathered all the others to train. The sight of her ice unleashed upon a still pool quickened Berserk’s blood in a song that demanded a fight, but she swallowed the feral urge. Years out of close proximity to any other Super had numbed that instinct, and in that numbness there was solace, clarity, and simplicity. Big or small, a pond with only one fish was a kingdom of one.

It took her a moment to realize Boomer was watching her in the creepy-cognizant way Brat used to do when they were teenagers and she’d witnessed something she wasn’t supposed to see. Berserk removed her hand from the railing and showed Boomer her back as she headed back inside. “If you’re coming, then keep up.”

He came when he was called, such a good boy, and soon they were back to wandering the solemn concrete halls. It struck Berserk that there were no pictures on the walls, no decorations, nothing to indicate that anyone or anything had lived here before. Nothing human, at least. The walls extended on into grey oblivion, a boring and monotonous kind of horror that beckoned onward, deeper. Berserk recalled how the automaton had melted into the walls, how Blossom’s key had done the same, and she dragged her palm along the glossy surface in search of skeletons.

As the hall opened up to an indoor balcony near the top of the dizzying room with the tree and the first Challenge Room, Berserk peered over the precipice to the dark fathoms below. She recalled a nature documentary she’d seen years ago about a pitcher plant. The carnivorous plant thrived in toxic soil inhospitable to most things that weren’t already dead. Bulbous and the color of a bruise, it lay in wait in a sticky bog until unwitting prey crawled over its slippery lips, enticed by the sweetness swirling deep in its belly. Therein the wretch drowned, drunk on nectar and stewed in a bile of its own juices until not even its dust remained. An immaculate devouring, the narrator had called it.

“Did you ever see that movie Pinocchio?” Boomer leaned on the ledge next to her. He didn’t wait for her answer before he continued. “There’s this part where Pinocchio gets swallowed by a monstrous whale when he’s looking for Geppetto, his father. They live in there for a while as they try to find a way out.” He let out a sharp breath, like he’d remembered something funny. “When I was a kid I always wondered, how can they stand it in there? Must be so dark all the time.”

Daggers of sunlight through the stained glass veins cast splatters of color on the concrete stairways that wound around the central tree. Berserk watched them spill over the edges and wash out to shadows on the floors far below.

“And so quiet just floating there in the darkness on their broken ship, their whole world,” Boomer said. “How did they sleep knowing they were surrounded by so many sharp teeth?”

Berserk tore her eyes away from the chilling kaleidoscope to look at her chatty ball and chain, but he was far away behind those sad blue eyes. “Fitfully,” she said.

“But they had each other.”

“It’s a Disney movie. It’s not that deep.”

Boomer chuckled sardonically. “Yeah.” They watched the view for a moment in silence, until he broke it again. “You know how they escaped?”

Berserk tipped her hand. “The power of friendship?”

“Started a fire, actually. Burned so hot the monster spat them out.” The gravity of his gaze pulled her back to him.

“How refreshingly savage. Good job, Disney.”

He said nothing to that, and they stood there at the lip of the drop off a moment longer mulling, until Berserk floated into the air over the edge.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“Find out.”

She didn’t wait for him, knowing he would follow no matter where she flew off to now, which was another balcony across the improbably vast room. More hallway greeted her on the other side, but this one ended in a dead end. It was a dead space with no windows or doors, and no stairs to reach it. Nothing but a man-sized triangle chiseled into the wall at the end.

“Hello,” Berserk said, approaching the dead end.

Boomer snatched her wrist for the second time today before she could touch the wall. Just as before, his hand was warm and calloused around her bare skin, at odds with his soft boyish look. “Wait, it could suck you in.”

She did not entertain the boy in him this time and swiftly twisted her hand free. “It could try.” She flattened her palm against the wall before he could stop her, and shuddered when the concrete shifted. As before with the library entrance, this doorway too shimmered into existence in a confluence of silver swirls. Unlike the library doorway, this one bore no obvious keyhole. Instead, an array of patterned discs covered the door. When Berserk touched one, it rotated easily under the slightest pressure.

Boomer slammed his hand over hers. Blue static jumped from him and traveled up her arm, uncomfortably pinching. “Berserk.”

The sound of her name in his voice nearly made her laugh. “Take your hand off me,” she said, the threat of a smile in her tone.

He removed his hand, but he snatched hers with it and pulled her back from the door. “This is dangerous.”

Her amusement with him ended here at the disappointed look in his eyes. “Congratulations on your reality check.”

He didn’t flinch, didn’t even blink as he stared her down. “I’m fucking terrified. I think you are too underneath it all, so please—” He released her and his power, leaving only his sunny hair fluffed with static. “Let’s leave this be for now.”

“Let me ask you something.” Berserk gestured around her at the House. “What do you think is going to happen when we finish all the trials and learn all the secrets of this place?”

“I don’t—”

She poked him in his chest and made him stumble back a step. “Do you think we’ll be beamed back to Earth with cheap airport souvenirs and a new Facebook photo album? You think we’ll all look back on this like a wacky intergalactic vacation?”

Boomer rubbed his abused chest. “Wait, what’re you saying?”

“I’m saying someone—or some _thing_ —went to a lot of trouble to bring us here. Nine Supers all abducted without a shred of resistance and transported who knows how far across the universe to a place we don’t understand and can’t escape.” She stepped closer and held his uncomfortable gaze because he needed to hear this. “The monster’s swallowed us whole, Boomer. The only way we’re getting out is by starting a big fucking fire.”

Before she could leave him to stew on the bleak truth of their situation, he surprised her with: “Then I’ll help you.”

“I don’t want your help.”

“But you need it.”

Boomer had just about worn out his thin welcome, but his sudden direct challenge both intrigued and irritated her, like picking at a crusty scab. She let her eyes glow with power and invaded his personal space. “Careful.”

Too worked up or too stupid, Boomer held his ground.“You said you’re the leader, but you can’t lead without a team behind you. You need Buttercup and me if you want to take on this Challenge Room, or you may not survive it. And I know you don’t know me well, so I’ll be straight with you: I’m not prepared to let you or anybody else go down alone. It’s not going to happen.”

Arrested under his gorgon’s gaze, Berserk had to remind herself to breathe. This close to him, she could make out the veins of grey in his eyes, crevasses revealing the uncompromising soul inside. And, well, he _had_ made all that effort. “Fine.” She showed him her back as she began to skip back down the way they’d come. “If you feel _that_ strongly about it.”

Predictably, Boomer sputtered like the unflattering dolt he was. “For real? I-I mean, yeah, I do.”

“Uh-huh. This House isn’t going to explore itself.”

He nearly tripped over himself jogging to catch up with her, a surprised but genuine smile on his face. “Right, yeah, let’s go.”

They stepped off the balcony to fly to the next one, and Berserk cast one last lingering look back at the locked Challenge Room door.

* * *

Robin used to babysit in high school to bring home some extra cash, and no job was ever worse than the Meyerson twins. The five-year-olds would get stuck in endless loops of “did not” “did too” until they were blue in the face and Robin was staring at the wall contemplating whether she could get away with double homicide if it was a crime of passion. The day she got a job at the neighborhood Malph’s bagging groceries in her Junior year was among the happiest of her adolescent life because it meant never having to manage squabbling children again. Until now.

“Is there any more orange juice?” asked Professor Eric Plutonium, the lovechild of Kip Thorne and Jack Sparrow who had invited himself to breakfast.

“That was the last of it.” Professor John Utonium set down his morning paper and took a generous sip of his glass of orange juice.

Sandwiched between the two of them at opposite heads of the table, Robin chewed her pancakes until they ground to a syrupy gruel in her mouth. _Oh, come on._

“Your glass is rather full,” Eric said. His plate was clean and his silverware was stacked neatly atop it. Not a smear of syrup remained.

“Not really.” John took another sip and drained more than half the glass.

Robin cleared her throat. “Professor, please pass the butter.”

Both professors reached for the butter at the same time and bumped knuckles. They both instantly retracted in a rather exaggerated whirlwind of blushing and curled fingers like they were a pair of endgame lovers in a Jane Austen novel stuck in the agonizing-over-your-lack-of-fortune stage. In the end, Robin had to stretch across the table and grab the butter herself to spare their delicate constitutions.

Two minutes passed.

Robin buttered her pancakes.

John’s half-drunk orange juice glass sat sweating condensation on the hand-painted clown coaster one of Bubbles’ kindergarten students had made during finger-painting hour.

“It just seems strange,” Eric said, unable to shut up for five minutes. “You don’t even like orange juice.”

“I like it just fine. Love it, even. Buy it all the time.” John didn't even look at his orange juice glass as he read the paper.

“You never cared for it when we were children.”

“Tastes change.”

“They absolutely do not.”

John set his paper aside. “I enjoy a glass of orange juice in the morning with my pancakes.”

“You filled your glass to the brim, _far_ fuller than a glass that size ought ever to be—”

“Because I enjoy a good Tropicana—”

“If that were true, you would have purchased the superior Extra Pulp variety—”

Robin slammed her hand on the table and jostled the cutlery. “That’s _quite_ enough. My god.” They both looked at her like she was the one overreacting, and she lost her appetite entirely. “For the record, Extra Pulp is disgusting. It’s like drinking orange-flavored sand. Objectively vile in every conceivable way.”

Eric pulled off a rather menacing glare with his eyepatch and prominent scar, but Robin was married to Bubbles; she would not be cowed so easily. She cleared her throat. “If you’re finished, can we please talk about how we’re going to get Bubbles and the others back from the aliens?”

“About that.” John reached for his pipe and lit it. A rich tobacco smell wafted around him, nostalgic and warm despite the many years Bubbles, her sisters, and even Robin herself had implored him to break the bad habit. “I can understand the logic of your hypothesis that our girls were taken by extraterrestrial beings in a bid to recover the Chemical X they left behind so many years ago. Robin’s account makes it all the more compelling.”

Robin pulled on her long brown hair to give her fingers something to wring. She shivered in her summer tank top at the memory of the entity that had come to the apartment she shared with Bubbles. Its nacreous skin shimmered like an oil slick, pretty but filthy. She didn’t remember much after it crippled her were she’d stood in the threshold, her limbs betraying her as she lay in a jelly heap helpless to do anything but cry as the thing carted a similarly immobilized Bubbles off like chattel.

“But?” Eric managed to look both smug and irritated at the same time, an inhuman feat that baffled as much as it unsettled. “What more reason do you need? I already told you, I came here in good faith.”

“Not a reason; a location,” John said. “We don’t even know the first place to begin looking. And even if we did, we would have no way of getting there. They could have been taken outside the solar system. To another galaxy, even. The technology to accomplish that sort of space travel doesn’t exist, and even if it did, it would require years to catch up to them.”

Eric laughed, and it made Robin’s skin crawl. “Johnny boy, who do you think you’re talking to?”

Robin had Googled Eric when she arrived at the Utonium residence late last night. He was a renowned astrophysicist and Nobel laureate, sure, but even Robin knew that space travel was a dangerous and fledgling field when one considered just how vast and unreachable the universe was. The farthest humans had gone to date was the Moon, and something in her gut told her that wherever the aliens had taken Bubbles and her sisters, it was a bit farther away than Earth’s moon.

“A man in over his head, or else you wouldn’t be here asking for my help,” John said, totally savage.

Eric’s only visible eye narrowed. “Need I remind you that you’ll need _my_ help too if you ever want to see your girls again?”

Robin sensed another argument coming on and got in the middle of it with a wave of her butter knife. “Hey, I have an idea. How about you,” she pointed to Eric, “reveal your big idea and end the burning suspense, and you,” she pointed to John next, “stop antagonizing the guy trying to help us?”

“You’re very forceful,” Eric said.

Robin met his cyclops stare unflinchingly. “Thank you.”

He smiled, and it struck her in that moment how uncanny his resemblance to John truly was. They could have been brothers rather than mere cousins.

“Chemical X.” Eric said it like it was the most obvious answer in the world.

John’s pipe hung forgotten in his hand. “What are you talking about?”

“You know I’m a man of action. Why settle for chalkboard theorems and formulae when I had the means to test them myself?”

“What does that mean?” Robin demanded. “In laymen’s terms, please.”

Eric chuckled and settled back in his chair. “In laymen’s terms, then. I built Super suits for my girls to accommodate intergalactic travel. All they needed was a dash of Chemical X to get them working beyond humanity’s self-imposed time-space continuum limitations.”

“Why would you do that?” Robin blurted out.

Both professors looked at her oddly, but Eric recovered smoothly with a wolfish grin. “Why wouldn’t I?”

 _Because it’s dangerous? Because you don’t know what’s out there? Because sending your daughters into the cold black void of space seems kind of shitty?_ Robin could think of a hundred reasons why it could be a bad idea, but the conversation pressed on before she could voice a single one of them.

“You want a ship,” John said heavily. “A ship powered with Chemical X…and you don’t have any, do you? That’s really why you’re here.”

“I would build it myself, but seeing as you already have one, I figured making the necessary modifications would be more expedient. You know, in the interest of retrieving our stolen girls.”

“You have a space ship, Professor?” Robin asked.

John had gone very pale all of a sudden. “I swore never to use it again.”

Before Robin got the chance to ask about that super ominous reveal, there was a loud knock on the front door. John got up to answer it. “Yes?”

He barely got his greeting out when a very short, very irate Mojo Jojo stormed inside brandishing a really big gun. “Professor Utonium, I have urgent business with you, which I suggest you pay attention to if you do not want me to shoot you with this extremely large proton gun. It _will_ hurt.”

“Mojo? What on Earth are you—”

“Ugh, _move_.” In strode Princess Morbucks with all the poise of a graceful steamroller as she plowed past Mojo and barged into the dining room. “Ew, why does it smell like wilted spinach and old people in here?”

Robin leaped to her feet. “Princess? What are you doing here?”

“I was getting to that—” Mojo protested.

“Looking for Brick.” Princess leveled Robin with a cold stare. Even this early on a weekend, she was still dressed to the nines in designer everything, like a chic canary with really great hair. “Some asshole abducted him and his brothers. Who the fuck are you?” She side-eyed Eric without an ounce of shame.

“Them too?” Robin’s heart sank.

Who had the power to kidnap nine powerful Supers and leave almost no trace? Something in Robin’s gut told her she would not like the answer.

“ _You_ ,” Mojo said, and marched into the Utonium household like he owned the place.

“Hey!” John tried and failed to stop him.

Eric rose from the table in one sinewy-smooth motion. “Mojo Jojo, what an unpleasant surprise. I thought you’d died.”

“Why, you rude, ill-mannered, disagreeable, insolent, _uncivil_ —”

Princess put two fingers in her mouth and whistled harshly. All present immediately shut up and stared at her. “Listen, Saturday is my no drama day, so everybody _shut up_ and tell us the plan to get Brick and the others back immediately.”

“It appears we’re building a space ship.” John sighed. He looked so weary, and it wasn’t even 10 a.m. “Or modifying one, to be more precise.”

“Modify—oh _no_ ,” Mojo said. “Surely you don’t mean that ridiculous hunk of scrap metal unfit even to strip for parts—”

“I do.” John’s tone had taken a rare edge of eat-shit-and-perish that surfaced when the soundness of his inventions was questioned. “Dynamo may be old and banned forever, but she isn’t _ridiculous_.”

Robin sank back into her chair in front of her cold pancakes and pulled John’s half-drunk orange juice to her. He wasn’t going to finish it, considering he, in fact, despised orange juice for its tartness but hey, one didn’t need three Ph.D.s to act like a petulant child on occasion.

Princess made a face. “What the hell is a Dynamo?”

Eric looked down at Princess over his nose. “Dynamo is how we cross the galaxy to get them all back. Now, I’ve waited long enough. It’s time to get to work.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Even Brick’s dick jokes are snobby and pedantic. Why do we like this clown again? [Oh, right.](https://www.instagram.com/p/CGD4MhhBls_/)
> 
> Next time: Berserk totally listens to Boomer about the Challenge Room and [they’re not suspicious at all](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyEBeHvNJvE).


	4. Through a Glass, Darkly

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FANART ALERT! 🚨🚨🚨 Check out [this totally badass Berserk art](https://www.instagram.com/p/CGK_7MsBFmB/) by hana_sketch_junks over on Instagram! 12/10 would thank her for punching me in the face. Go see more of Hana’s art on Instagram. I promise you’ll thank me for it.

Nights were for contemplating murder, apparently.

Brick paused midway through a paragraph in his book about the properties and habitats of Source trees when Berserk sauntered into the library sometime after dinner. Unfortunately, she was alone, which meant Brick would have to deal with her entirely by himself.

“Moved on from galactic cocks, I see?” Berserk said when she eyed the cover of his chosen book.

The urge to maim hit him with an almost tangible force tonight. Perhaps it was the solace spent away from her blistering company all day, now tragically cut short.

“I can tell you’re disappointed,” he snapped back.

Berserk laughed, a grating sound like rocks on a washboard and just as blistering. “Save some of that fuckboi energy for Blossom before you totally peter out. It’s barely 9 p.m.”

It was so easy to dislike Berserk. Brick had met very few people who kept him on the edge of his seat for better or for worse, and Berserk was by far the worst. Case in point: she snatched the half-drunk glass of blue wine he’d poured for himself and downed it in two gulps.

“I was drinking that,” he said.

Berserk smelled the sapphire dregs that swirled at the bottom of the glass. “Huh.”

When she didn’t elaborate, he said: “What?”

“Tastes like wine.” She reached for the bottle, but he took it before she could grab it.

“This one is clearly mine.”

Berserk dangled his pilfered glass in his face. “I got the glass.”

Brick brought the bottle to his lips and took a generous sip just to spite her. She was masochistically amused. “Classy.”

“If you came down here just to annoy me, then fuck off. I’m busy.”

Berserk hopped onto the table excruciatingly close to his tidy workspace and knocked over a neat pile of books he’d set aside to read later. She selected one at random and opened it up. “Soil composition? Jesus, you’re boring.”

Brick reorganized the pile on his other side out of her immediate reach. “While you were off doing I don’t care what, I was here finding a way off this planet.”

“And did you find it?”

Her saccharine smile made his skin crawl. He retrieved the book she’d taken and added it back to his pile. “It’s just a matter of time.”

“What’s a matter of time?” Blossom asked as she entered the library, freshly showered after a long day of training with her team.

Berserk had the audacity to boop Brick’s nose before she slid off the table. Heat exploded upon his shoulders, but she was far out of his reach in a flash.

“The rapid deterioration of my brain cells,” Brick said. He glared tremendously at Berserk as she skipped over to Blossom.

Blossom made a face that was halfway between a smile and a grimace. “Lovely.”

“Don’t listen to him, he’s a sourpuss. Space wine?” Berserk offered Blossom the empty wine glass, which she took on reflex.

“Um, sure…”

Berserk waved over her shoulder and disappeared into the hall. Brick rubbed his eyes and willed away the budding headache Berserk’s presence had induced.

“You two seem to be getting along,” Blossom said as she slipped into the seat at the table opposite Brick and reached for his stack of books.

“Like a lion and a rabid hyena.” Brick watched the wry smile she bit back.

“You don’t see it, do you?” 

“See what?”

Rosy eyes flickered coyly over the rim of her book, and he swallowed the urge to flinch. “You’re very similar.”

“We’re not.”

She happily ignored him at her peril.

“Hey.” Brick reached across the table with a short burst of Super speed and forcefully lowered the book. It hit the table with a thump that reverberated like a thunderclap in the cavernous, empty library. Blossom dropped the teasing air real fast as her body tensed. He could practically smell the fight or flight response radiating from her like a pheromone, and it went straight to his ego.

Pink sparks dusted her fingers where she pushed his hand off her book with the sort of _Try me, bitch_ energy he had forgotten from her in all these years apart. If he were seventeen again, he would have said something crass and walked away with the last word. Now, all he could do was stare.

“Relax,” she said, and her voice pitched lower, softer. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

The room around them frayed at the edges while they watched each other with suffocating focus, as heavy as her hand anchoring his to the table. He didn’t move it; he couldn’t move it. Her power snapped under the sleeve of his jacket and crept up his wrist in a breathless whisper.

“All right, nerds. I come bearing brain juice.” Berserk returned with two fresh wine bottles and all the subtlety of a hurricane, and with her all the air that had left the room rushed back in. Blossom snatched her hand back and Brick sucked in a sharp breath as he balanced his unburdened palms on the edge of the table. “Fuck is wrong with you two?” Berserk asked.

“Nothing,” Blossom snapped.

Brick grimaced at that smarmy tone he remembered well from high school. He had the sudden urge to spit the bad taste from his mouth, but he settled for wine and took one of the two fresh glasses Berserk had brought because there was no way in hell he was drinking out of something her lips had tainted. “Give me that.”

He imagined his very bad mood pouring out with the wine and pooling at the bottom of his glass along with his dignity and five years off his life expectancy.

“Did you learn anything exploring the House today?” Blossom asked, perpetually irritated about every little goddamned thing.

“Maybe.” Berserk pulled out a chair at the end of the table slow enough to screech over the floor and flopped down on it.

When she didn’t elaborate, Blossom said: “And?”

Berserk finished filling her glass and then Blossom’s. “It’s big.”

“So you learned nothing,” Brick said. His frustration was happy to have a new target in Berserk, and he smirked in that way he knew pissed people off. “What a surprise.”

Berserk only chuckled. “Says the guy who spent all afternoon reading about dirt and can’t even name the planet we’re on.”

The laughter in her eyes was less teasing and more _Eat shit and die, you useless cunt_. Which, considering the low rung he’d landed on after that bizarre and never-to-be-thought-about-again encounter with Blossom minutes earlier, only left Brick with room to rise up.

“Understanding the ecosystem that’s keeping us alive seemed like an important priority,” Brick said. “And there are hundreds of books in this library. Maybe if I had a little help, we could get off this acid trip of a planet.”

“Maybe if you spent less time rubbing it out to the sound of your own voice, you could have weeded out the useless bullshit by lunch and made a fucking dent—”

“ _Maybe_ if you’d spent some time actually working instead of treating this like a fucking vacation—”

“Time out!” Blossom shouted. “My god, do you even hear yourselves?”

Brick didn’t miss a beat. “And you. You spent a whole day throwing punches. I expect that from the Greens, but not you.”

“ _Excuse_ me—” Blossom sputtered.

“No, you’re not fucking excused,” Brick cut her off. “The answers to all our questions are here in this room waiting for us to find them. A room that’s available only to us, by the way. It’s fucking absurd that I’m the only one who seems to care about getting off this planet.”

“I _care_ ,” Blossom hissed. “The library is important, of course, but so is being ready to face whatever’s lurking in this House. You didn’t fight the monster in the Challenge Room; I did. Don’t patronize me.”

“Why do you think we’re all here now?” Berserk interjected. “Pass me a damn book and stop talking. I’m literally getting heartburn listening to your voice.”

“Be my guest.” Brick shoved a book across the table to Berserk to shut her up, and unfortunately she caught it gracefully. She put her feet up on the table and had the gall to grin like this was all some joke to her. Blossom picked up her own book and curled up in her chair with her wine, clearly intent on tuning both of them out.

 _Good riddance_ , Brick thought as he took a new book from his pile and settled in for a few more hours of reading.

He glanced at Blossom over the rim of his book, but her nose was buried deep in her own book.

Good riddance to that too.

* * *

Brat opened her eyes to a familiar, groggy, early morning haze. The champagne that had gone down like stars last night settled in a bitter, sticky bile at the back of her throat the morning after. She swallowed and regretted it now as much as she had the first time she’d woken up here. Her sheets were soft and smelled faintly of cologne. Shadows draped the sheer curtains of her canopy bed and hid last night’s hastily discarded party clothes on the floor. For a moment, she stared at her arm hanging over the dark blue sequin dress puddled on the carpet and wondered how long this moment would last if she didn’t look up.

A discreet shuffling sound from the connecting bathroom caught her ears, like it did every time she found herself back here. Nothing could slip past her Super hearing, not even him.

“You’re leaving,” she said. Her arm tingled, asleep.

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” Brick said. The remorse in his voice was as clear to her now as it had been when this moment first happened, only back then she hadn’t realized it was all for him and not at all for her.

He was buttoning up last night’s dress shirt when she rolled over on her back. Four more, now three. He would be gone in a handful of seconds, forget his cufflinks on her nightstand, and tell her he didn’t need them back later when she would try texting him about it. Sometimes she would call him instead of texting, but he never picked up for her. Sometimes she would ask him to stay, and sometimes he would, but it was never quite right. There was only so much her imagination could cook up from the memories, and every time she revisited this one he faded a little more.

Except now. His face was as clear as it had ever been, older than she remembered, less gracious, or worse at hiding it. A couple years could alter so much, at least in him. But she was still stuck here in this bed, hung over and sad and clinging to a scene that had not satisfied her in a long time.

“I should go,” Brick said at the same time as she said, “You should go.”

He stared at her out of the corner of her eye. Brat had never told him to leave before, and she couldn’t imagine what his reaction might be. Flabbergasted, perhaps? Offended? Scorned? Curiosity got the better of her and she looked right at him, but there was nothing in those heartless, red eyes.

“You’re not the one I want, anyway,” she said.

“No,” he said, with all the kindness of bad news delicately delivered.

“No,” she echoed him. “But you’re all I’ve got.”

He didn’t say anything to that because she’d never spoken to him like that. All he had for her was that empty, iron stare that had only ever left her bereft. Feeling nothing was better than what lay beyond this room buried so deep she could scarcely remember it was even there.

The edges of the room began to fray as her mind wandered deeper into the crevasse she’d overfilled with icing and fluff. No matter how deeply she buried it, it would always be there, that burned bit at the bottom of a cake pan, bitter and crusted. The bile on her tongue smacked like tar when she swallowed again. The pillow smelled like him when she pressed her face into it and breathed.

She hated this dream.

Just as Brat prepared to sink into the sheets and banish this revenant before she could watch him walk out of her life forever like he did every time, the doorknob twisted and the door burst open.

“Brick…?” Boomer’s wide eyes trailed from a surprised Brick fiddling with the sleeve button on his dress shirt to Brat tangled up in the bedsheets.

The moment Brat locked eyes with him, she screeched. “What the hell are you doing in my dream?!”

Boomer was too stunned to respond, and Bubbles poked her head over his shoulder at the scene literally unraveling around them as Brat lost control of the dream. “Oh no,” Bubbles said.

Brat leaped out of bed and barreled right through Brick, who disappeared like smoke as she got in Boomer’s face and blazed blue. But the minute she grabbed him by the throat and he didn’t disappear like his conjured brother, her entire body went numb. Bubbles shouted her name and cold hands reached for her, but Brat’s head spun and the champagne she had drunk one dream night ago came up like broken glass. Shards of stars burst from her lips and ripped through the fabric of the lucid dream as Boomer wrenched her hand off his throat.

“It’s happening again!” he said, which made absolutely no sense.

Stars swirled at their feet, winking eyes that rose around them. Brat locked gazes with the biggest, blackest, ugliest one, and it opened wide to swallow them whole. The cold pavement broke her fall with a soft crunch under her old high school stockings. Beside her, Boomer and Bubbles struggled to get their bearings. Under the garish light of a full moon, the shards of Brat’s smothered nightmare gleamed like freshly spilled pearls.

“Begging, really? Pathetic.” Berserk’s voice cut with all the demented grace of an axe, even in a memory surfaced from the blackest crags of her subconscious.

“Brat,” Bubbles said, concerned.

Brat shook with the force of an oncoming panic attack as memory dragged her to her feet and there was nothing she could do to stop it. “You can’t leave us,” she heard herself say ten years ago, on the verge of tears. God, she’d been so pathetic. Such an embarrassment. “Please!”

Berserk’s magenta eyes were two uncut jewels in her dark silhouette. Not even recent memories could drag her out of the shadows where she’d been interred long ago.

“You have each other,” Berserk said, as if that was fair. As if it was the same thing. As if Brat should have been grateful.

“It’s not the same,” she whined, once upon a time. “You’re my sister too. My leader. You _can’t_ just—”

She knew it was coming, but she couldn’t make her younger avatar move out of the way of her big sister’s wrath shoved against her uniform blazer. It burned a hand-shaped brand into the lapels, which their father would have skinned her for if it wasn’t a relic after tonight’s graduation ceremony.

Steady hands caught her before she could fall: Bubbles, and Boomer beside her. But she couldn’t even turn to look at them as her sister’s wraith commanded absolute devotion.

“From now on I work alone,” Berserk said. “So should you, if you want to survive.”

Brat’s tears were hot on her cheeks, ruining her mascara, but unlike ten years ago, all she felt in them now was fury. Even so, the words her heart remembered were full of despair. “I can’t, not without you.”

“Snap out of it,” Boomer said, shaking Brat’s shoulder as he moved between her and that horrible night. “Brat—”

But all she could hear was that voice full of venom. “Then you’ll suffer,” Berserk said.

Bubbles’ grip tightened around Brat, and it became impossible to breathe. Boomer was shouting, his voice nothing but a drowned gurgle as the memory smothered him too. Brat’s heart jackhammered so badly it was close to bursting from her chest as blue power gathered in her fists. She could still taste the lingering moulder of champagne and Brick, the wasted years to come, empty as she scraped away the very edges of herself. Words were weeds with deep roots, and none had ever burrowed deeper than her sister’s the night she left without a trace and didn’t show up again until they all woke up together at Trinity House.

Hands covered her eyes, and a voice more powerful than the thistle thorns wrapped around her bones screamed loud and clear: “Wake up!”

Brat woke up.

* * *

Bubbles couldn’t tell if the screams shaking the foundations of the Blue Wing were hers or her roommates’. She was on her feet in a flash of blue, careless of the freezing concrete floor that bit at her bare soles. Boomer jackknifed out of the bed beside hers, but there was no sign of Brat in her bed—she had launched herself into a corner on the ceiling.

“It worked,” Boomer said. “We’re awake now, right?”

“What the _fuck_ ,” Brat said, heaving and shivering as she remained planted in the high corner like a frightened animal.

“Yeah, we’re all awake. Everything’s fine,” Bubbles said, her eyes trained on her cousin who looked like she was coming down from one hell of a panic attack. Brat’s long curtain of blonde and blue hair was in sweaty disarray, and she shivered in her thin pajama shorts. “Brat? Can you hear me?”

Sharp blue eyes swiveled to Bubbles’.

“It’s over,” Bubbles said, trying to keep her voice calm and soft. “We’re all awake back in the Blue Wing now, see?”

Brat licked her lips and parted her damp bangs with shaking fingers. “You were in my dream.”

“Yeah.”

“How?”

“I have no idea. First Boomer showed up in mine, and then we found you somehow…”

Brat swallowed hard. Despite their animosity, Bubbles’ heart hurt to see her reduced to such a small, shaking ball of nerves. Every instinct in her screamed to comfort Brat, but just as she floated off the ground to do just that, Boomer found his voice.

“You and my brother?” It was less a question looking for confirmation than one hoping for a denial. His knees were bent in an attack stance, and tiny sparks glittered upon his white knuckles.

That triggered something in Brat, and she dropped down to the floor. Still shaking, nonetheless the uncrackable veneer was back in her dark eyes. “That’s none of your business,” she snapped.

“The hell it isn’t. We were in your _dream_.”

Brat moved so fast, it was a wonder she had ever been shaken at all. But Boomer was just as fast and caught her wrist before she could backhand him through the wall. “Fuck _off_ , pretty boy,” she hissed.

“Whoa!” Bubbles got in between them before a real fight could break out and shoved them forcefully apart. “Calm down, both of you.”

Brat wiped spittle from her lips with the back of her hand as she glared hatefully at Boomer, who was all too happy to return her poison as he shook under the force of his pent up power. The room had grown oppressively warm under the tension between the three of them, and if she didn’t do something to defuse it fast, they would all be sorry.

“It was an accident,” Bubbles said. “I didn’t mean to enter your dream.”

“Neither did I, for the record,” Boomer said when Brat’s gaze flickered between them. “It just happened.”

“Oh, yeah? And why should I believe you?” Brat said.

“Because Bubbles and I don’t have that kind of power!” Boomer said.

“Unless…we do,” Bubbles said. She eyed the raw power rising from her palms as she kept her volatile counterparts from beating the daylights out of each other. It sluiced off her like water without even thinking about it.

_They said there’s Chemical X in everything, even the walls…_

“I’m a lucid dreamer,” Bubbles said. “I’ve always been, for as long as I can remember.”

“Me too,” Boomer said after a beat, cautious, like it was his first time revealing such a secret.

Brat said nothing, but her silence was all the confirmation Bubbles needed.

“What if there’s Chemical X even in our dreams?” Bubbles asked.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Brat said snidely.

“You think this could be some new power?” Boomer asked.

“No, maybe just an enhancement of what we already shared. What did the automaton say about the Blue Wing? About dreams?”

“It’s the house of dreams and the hidden world,” Boomer said. He rubbed his temples and slumped to the floor, the fight gone from him. “Perfect…”

“So what, we’re lucid dreaming together now?” Brat said. “You’ve _got_ to be kidding me. Even my dreams aren’t private in this place!”

“I think you might be right,” Bubbles said.

Brat made a sour face as she sneered, but in that moment Bubbles really couldn’t blame her for her outrage. “Forget this.” Brat stalked back to her bed and opened up the chest of clothes at the foot. Without bothering to remove her pajamas, she pulled on loose blue pants and a jacket over them and headed for the door.

“Hey, wait! It’s the middle of the night,” Bubbles said, flying to intercept her waspish cousin.

“I don’t care. I’m not spending another minute in this room with either of you.” Brat shoved past Bubbles and disappeared outside down the hall in a blur.

Sleep did not come easy the rest of that night. Bubbles tried to rest, but she kept thinking about Brat and her dreams she and Boomer had accidentally invaded. Boomer was little help, as he turned over in bed and didn’t seem to want to talk about it. It felt like hours passed in the darkness, with only the faintest moonlight through the narrow stained glass windows.

At some point, Bubbles must have dozed off because Boomer’s voice sounded so far away when he said: “It’s not safe for her to be out there all night.”

Bubbles turned over in her cot, but Boomer still had his back to her. In that moment, achingly, she wished she could crawl into bed next to him, just to feel the warmth of someone she trusted nearby. “She won’t come back unless it’s on her own terms. I know her.”

“Do you?” He turned over to face her. In the darkness, she could only barely make out the faint glow of moonlight in his blue eyes.

Bubbles bit her lip as she thought about the nightmare Brat’s subconscious had dragged them into. Never had she felt such a deep, wrenching melancholy. To think anyone could feel so achingly hopeless was unthinkable. How did Brat live with it? How did she go about her days like it wasn’t haunting her day and night?

She didn’t give Boomer an answer.

* * *

Buttercup woke to dawn’s first light through the narrow stained glass windows and warmth surrounding her. She yawned and stretched like a cat. The body wrapped around her pressed a sloppy, sleepy kiss to her shoulder, and when she shifted, he tightened his arm around her middle.

“Five more minutes,” Butch muttered.

The toilet flushed in the nearby bathroom. Buttercup made a face and threw his arm off so she could get up. “I’m hungry.”

Butch groaned and rolled onto his belly in her bed. His own bunk directly above remained untouched, and Brute’s above his was neatly made. The bitch barely slept, Buttercup swore. No matter how many times she jolted awake in the night, Brute was awake and either meditating on her bed or doing pushups on the common room floor. Talk about Superhuman.

Buttercup dressed quickly in her bland, entirely green wardrobe and passed Brute on her way to the bathroom.

“Morning,” Buttercup said.

Brute nodded, and Buttercup reached for her toothbrush. Distantly, she could hear Brute and Butch.

“Hm,” Brute grunted.

“Mornin’ to you too, sunshine,” Butch said before rolling out of bed stark naked. Brute took one cursory look at him, shrugged, and busied herself with the far more interesting loose thread on her green jacket.

Buttercup rolled her eyes and focused on finishing her routine. The morning passed without anything supernatural happening, which was a small victory considering her current situation. She was running through some solo stretches in the garden when Boomer rolled in to ruin her entire day.

“Have you seen Berserk anywhere?” he asked, slightly out of breath.

Buttercup rose from her plank and wiped sweat from her forehead. “Literally what would make you think I’ve seen her?”

“I’m serious; I haven’t run in to her anywhere. She was at breakfast, and then nothing.”

Buttercup snorted. “Good. Let her slip back into her snake pit for all I care.”

She tried to go back to her workout, but Boomer grabbed her elbow. “She’s our leader. We can’t just let her wander off alone in an interdimensional haunted house.”

Buttercup grabbed his wrist in a grip that was entirely too tight to be friendly. “She’s _not_ our leader, and don’t you forget it. Save yourself some headache.”

“Like it or not, we’re stuck with her in our team. We should at least try to work together, don’t you think?”

Buttercup liked Boomer well enough. He was a nice guy, a fun drunk, and he was good to Butch. But the guy was such a stress ball looking for a squeeze. One of these days, someone was going to squeeze him so hard he’d pop, and he’d probably apologize like it was all his fault.

“No,” Buttercup said, full stop. She resumed her lunges, but Boomer blocked her path. He looked pissed.

“Wrong answer. I’m going to find her, and you’re coming with me.”

Now he was starting to make her mad. “Boomer, drop it already—”

“No. Look, we found another Challenge Room yesterday, and I’m starting to think she went back alone even though I _told_ her to wait—”

Buttercup grabbed his shirt front. “Back up. You found another Challenge Room?”

“Yeah, but—”

“Jesus, Boomer. Lead with that next time. Why the hell didn’t you tell me this yesterday?”

“She agreed to wait for you and go back together!”

“Yeah, right. Newsflash, Berserk is a dick. Now where’s the Challenge Room?”

Boomer’s expression fell with true disappointment, but it was gone quickly. He looked somberly back at the House. “We better hurry.”

It didn’t take long to arrive at the Challenge Room tucked away in a dead end hallway off the arboretum. The back wall was nothing but a mirror that curiously did not reflect Buttercup and Boomer. There was no sound coming from behind it like there had been during the last Challenge Room fight.

“Whoa,” Boomer said. “That wasn’t here last time.”

“Probably because she unlocked it and went in alone.” Vaguely, Buttercup knew she should have said something to Blossom before taking off with Boomer, but there was no time now. If Berserk got herself killed in there, it would probably cause a little upset in the House. Berserk may have sucked harder than a starving leech, but she didn’t deserve to die on a drugged-up alien planet far from home. Mostly.

“We have to help her.” Boomer ran through the mirror wall with a splash, as if it were a liquid portal.

Buttercup groaned. “Shit on a stick.” With no choice, she stepped through the doorway into the pocket dimension.

* * *

What awaited on the other side was not the living, concrete arena Butch had described from the first Challenge Room, but the same hallway Boomer thought he had left behind. “The hell…?” He turned back and found the mirror doorway, except this time his reflection looked back at him. “That’s weird.”

Boomer approached the doorway, and his reflection drew nearer. Inches away, he saw clearly the distortion that had piqued his curiosity: the eyes had black scleras, and they widened with his own as a spike of fear hit him at the base of his skull.

His reflection grinned back at him all on its own.

It reached for him through the mirror.

Boomer gasped and fell back in terror as hands grabbed him before he could hit the floor.

“Boomer! For fuck’s sake,” Buttercup said, hauling him to his feet.

“Buttercup?” Breathing hard, he looked over her shoulder at the mirror portal she’d just come through. Sure enough, his reflection was there, but it was a perfect copy of himself, eyes and all.

“Obviously, dumbass. So where is she?” Buttercup looked around. “And where are we?”

Boomer swallowed the bile in his throat and told himself to pull it together. “I don’t know. It looks like the House, but we definitely came through the mirror.”

Buttercup didn’t say anything to that as she looked around, her expression grim. “Let’s just stay together. She’s gotta be in here somewhere.”

The Challenge Room was a sprawling mirror image of Trinity House itself. Except that the walls were shiny with cracked glass, reflective in the pale light streaming through the windows. When Boomer tried to peer outside the windows, there was nothing but empty, sepulchral white.

The arboretum’s colossal tree was a withered, grey column, its rotten apples a fetid imitation of their golden counterparts in the real Trinity House. As Boomer and Buttercup surveyed the sprawling room, he detected movement from the corner of his eye. When he turned, there was nothing there but the glossy wall. He stared at his reflection in the weird wall, warped in the patchwork shards that coated every surface like a silver mosaic.

There, a vivid blur—

“Hey, bitch!” Buttercup shouted. Her voice carried in the empty room, bouncing off the walls and ceiling with no way out. No one answered. “Nothing can be easy, huh.”

Boomer continued to watch the walls. He could’ve sworn he’d seen… “Blossom said they found a key in the last Challenge Room. Maybe Berserk went after the one in here?”

“I mean, sure.”

“Where would it be, do you think?”

“Hell if I know. This whole place is like a maze of Completely Fucked Up.”

_Tell me about it._

After last night’s real-life Inception: The Major Motion Picture, Boomer was starting to distrust the very walls.

“Over here!”

Boomer whirled on the voice coming from a balcony across the arboretum, but there was no one there. “Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?” Buttercup said. She looked at him like he’d taken a shit and hadn’t washed his hands after.

Boomer didn’t bother answering her and simply flew across the room toward the hallway that beckoned. He cursed himself for not sticking near Berserk this morning after breakfast. He should have known she’d come back here after the way she’d been reluctant to leave yesterday. But why would she come back alone? After everything they had witnessed from the last Challenge Room and how beat up Blossom’s team had been? After he’d explicitly told her he would help her?

“You stubborn idiot,” he muttered under his breath.

The halls glistened with his and Buttercup’s passing. Distantly, he thought he heard the patter of running steps, but there was no one there but the two of them. Buttercup wasn’t looking at him as she studied the walls like she was waiting for something to pop out.

“Buttercup,” he said.

“Mm,” she said, her gaze focused elsewhere.

Boomer was glad she didn’t see how much that bothered him.

He didn’t look at the walls anymore. He didn’t dare.

The foyer was just ahead. He could hear the gurgle of the X fountain around the corner as he approached the stairs. “Berserk? Hey!”

There she was, staring into the fountain’s pool with her back to him. She didn’t acknowledge his call.

Buttercup shoved past him. “There you are. You better have the key, I swear to god.”

Boomer frowned and dashed down the stairs to meet Berserk. “Are you all right?” he asked softly.

He expected her to snap back at him, probably tell him to suck her dick if he was so obsessed with her. But she only giggled.

“Berserk?” He touched her shoulder, but he recoiled immediately. She was corpse cold.

“Oh, Boomer.” She took hold of his wrist. Her nails were so sharp they pierced his skin, as if Chemical X’s laws didn’t apply here. “You’re really such a _sad_ boy, aren’t you?”

Boomer stared into her wrong eyes, the magenta made bloody against black scleras and her smile an unstitched wound. He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t _accept._

Not-Berserk scraped her taloned hand over his cheek, tender as a lover’s. “My pretty little puppy,” she crooned, digging her tapered, sharp nails into his temple.

And then, Buttercup punched her in the face.

Boomer gagged and clutched his cheek. She hadn’t cut him deeply, but his X was slow to heal him in here. Too slow.

Not-Berserk hit the banister and cracked it. The concave punch dent in her face sparkled as diamond shards of her dripped onto the floor. Buttercup slid in front of Boomer, her fists glowing green.

“You good?” Buttercup asked.

Boomer stared, mesmerized, as Not-Berserk’s face shimmered back together. His stomach twisted with the need to turn itself inside-out. “Not even a little.”

“I’ll handle this.”

“Of course you will,” Not-Berserk said with a cruel smile. Buttercup growled and lunged at her, and so began a game of cat and mouse between a pair of wrecking balls as Buttercup shattered the rest of the banister in her impassioned pursuit.

Boomer was not about to let Buttercup face the imposter alone, but before he could go after her, he heard the echoed voice again.

“Boomer!”

He whirled on the wall opposite him. “Berserk?” There was the real deal inexplicably trapped on the other side of the fractured wall. Cracks warped her face in a kaleidoscope of color and straight up rage. “Oh my god. How…?”

“There’s not much time. You have to get me out, but _don’t_ touch the—shit!”

Jagged blue came at her out of nowhere, and she was forced to flee as another explosive battle began beyond the mirror. Boomer barely had time to consider what more she might have said if she hadn’t been cut short when the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end and his body moved on reflex just in time to catch Buttercup. They crash-landed against the fountain, which collapsed under their combined force and gushed black X water everywhere.

Not-Berserk loomed over them in the air, unscathed like she hadn’t just faced the Toughest Fighter one-on-one, and that was when Boomer knew they were screwed if they didn’t take her out fast together.

“Motherfucker.” Buttercup rolled off him with a curse. They were both soaked.

A low, sinister laughter sank through Boomer like needles, and he knew instinctively it was his own imposter lurking through the glass, watching him and terrorizing the real Berserk every second longer she was stuck in there. They had to get her out before it was too late.

“Hey,” he said, getting to his feet as he watched Not-Berserk flex her Slender Man talons. “I have an idea, but it’s going to hurt.”

Buttercup eyed him askance as he began channeling the power this strange place warped beyond Earth’s paltry limits. She snorted derisively and wiped moisture from her mouth. “I like a little pain.”

Which was good, because this was about to suck big time for her. Boomer bent his knees and spread his palms as he surged with power beyond his comprehension. Blue lightning ignited on the gushing fountain like fireworks, drawn to him and to Buttercup both as she hurtled straight for Not-Berserk. Boomer was right behind her, and they sandwiched the imposter in an incandescent group hug. Buttercup grunted in pain, but she held on like the top tier badass she was and squeezed until Not-Berserk’s mirrored façade crunched. The moment Boomer felt her begin to implode, he shifted his gravity and threw Buttercup off before lunging at the nearest wall with tempestuous force.

Pinned between a sparkling Boomer and the wall, the imposter could do nothing but shriek as her face shattered like a popped disco ball under his electric power. The color she mirrored faded to chilling silver as she short-circuited back to her true form, and Boomer pinned her wrists to the wall as he pushed harder.

Fingers slipped around his and pushed back. He looked up just as the real Berserk surfaced through the rippling glass in a magenta flourish and grabbed her deranged doppelgänger by the neck. Boomer fell back under her gravity as she forced the imposter to eat concrete under her fist. “Get fucked you desperate photocopy,” she snarled.

Momentarily stunned by her savage bid for dominance, Boomer was slow to realize it wasn’t her hand that had reached for his through the mirror. Black scleras and a face carved from crystal fixed on him as it crawled out of its reflective prison.

“Boo,” his imposter said.

Black lightning exploded where they touched, and Boomer screamed.

* * *

The moment Berserk was free and clear of her shitty facsimile, Boomer had to go and do the one thing she had tried to tell him _not_ to do. The imposter’s inclement power sapped the oxygen from the room and turned it toxic as he zapped Boomer. Berserk rolled out of the way before it became too much to suffer, and that was when Buttercup came in hot and hard wielding a thick chunk of the broken fountain.

“Let him go!” she shouted as she clocked Not-Boomer hard in the face with a fistful of crystal before he could fry his real-world counterpart.

Berserk bared her teeth. Her imposter was done for, nothing but a pile of dust, but if Boomer’s was packing lightning powers, it would be better to end this as fast as possible. The Challenge Room Key was here, she knew it. And this time, she wouldn’t be fooled by its mirror image.

“Keep that thing busy!” she ordered as she took off toward the Trinity House pyramid crest at the apex of the ceiling, a perfect reflection of the one she’d reached for in the fountain. Just her luck that her so-called team was a pair of dysfunctional idiots, because the next thing she knew, Not-Boomer had grabbed her ankle and swung her around into the wall.

Groaning through the pain, she opened her eyes to see Not-Boomer powering up another horrific black lightning attack and grinning like a circus freak. He wasn’t going to let her get that key easily.

“You okay?” Boomer asked Buttercup, who looked like she’d been swallowed and shat back out.

“ _No_ ,” she snapped.

Berserk dashed toward the stairs, but the imposter followed her at the expense of the other two, confirming her suspicions. Boomer saw her plight and actually looked worried.

“Berserk!”

“A little _busy_!” she ground out as she feigned left and the imposter sank his fist into the floor. A crater opened up under his tainted power, but Berserk didn’t stick around to admire it.

The crackle of thunder triggered some new flavor of PTSD to add to her master collection as Not-Boomer charged up, and she was _not_ about to let him hit her again, no fucking way. She had to get that key and end this.

The real Boomer flew to help her. “Where’s the key?” he asked.

The imposter roared as oily sparks oozed from him and promised a galaxy of pain and suffering.

He hurtled toward them.

Berserk reached for Boomer, and he readily reached back. That, more than the risk, jump-started her foul and miserly heart. He didn’t even realize what was happening until she’d already let go, delivering him right into the arms of their attacker. But there was no time to dwell on his stunned blue eyes, the curl of his fingers as he tried to hold on to her, and none for his grunt of pain as the viscous lightning drowned him, as thick as a pool of tar. It was her only chance.

“Oh, fuck!” Buttercup fought through her beating because that was what she did, what she could be counted on to do no matter how hard she had fallen. Berserk counted on it now as she shot toward the pyramid crest and the reflection of the key at its peak that couldn’t possibly be a reflection.

The loud snap of Buttercup clashing with Not-Boomer shuddered through Berserk’s bones with elemental force, but her focus could only be on the goal. She punched the mirrored ceiling with everything she had, and her fingers closed around something cold and iron. The triple-bit Challenge Room Key seemed so heavy in her hand that it may have weighed a boulder’s mass in that moment. It dragged her back to the floor with finality, where Boomer and Buttercup landed at her feet.

The imposter was instantly shattered into a million glass shards that snowed down on them. Boomer heaved on the floor, still sparking and completely ravaged. For a suffocating second, Berserk couldn’t bring herself to avert her gaze, curious whether he might shatter too.

Buttercup’s green blaster hit her in the shoulder and broke the moment, as well as Berserk’s clavicle. She swore and clutched her ruined shoulder, but Buttercup wasn’t done. “What the fuck is your problem?!” she spat, taking another swing.

Berserk was ready for her this time and evaded. An embarrassingly short skirmish ensued that ended in Buttercup flat on her way too exhausted ass and Berserk barely holding it together, but hell if she’d let that bitch see it.

“Don’t _ever_ attack me like that again,” Berserk said.

“You just threw him to the wolves! What the hell is wrong with you?”

Boomer struggling to sit up on the heels of his palms was an annoying distraction to Berserk’s already tenuous focus. She forced herself not to look at him. “I had to get the key. It was the only way to end this—”

“Shut up. He could have fucking died, you asshole. And you let it happen. You did it on purpose.”

“I don’t owe you an explanation. We won, end of discussion.”

“No, we didn’t,” Boomer said. His gaze was dark and sad, like one of those abused infomercial animals begging for a shred of kindness, but she didn’t crack. Berserk never cracked. She couldn’t afford to, or she would have shattered to pieces herself a long time ago.

But when he looked at her like that, she was no less brittle than her glass imposter.

Berserk clenched her teeth so hard she felt a molar crack. The flash-fire pain centered her. “We’re done here.”

Buttercup laughed bitterly as she dusted herself off. “You’re right about that much.” She didn’t stick around a moment longer.

Berserk sneered and turned to Boomer, but he wasn’t even looking at her. His bangs had fallen into his face, his clothes were a charred ruin, and he struggled to stay afloat.

A paroxysm of emotion came over her then, and in a bout of crippling insanity she reached for Boomer. He was gone before she could find the words to tell him to wait.

Her prize was cold in her hand, and she stayed there a while longer among the rest of the broken pieces.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BIG thanks to my ever intrepid beta, Mordor, for the late night character analysis, conspiracy plotting, and general simping that went in to this chapter and what’s yet to come. Whenever I think I have a good idea, he somehow makes it even better.
> 
> And thanks to everybody who continues to drop kudos, comment (!!! I love y’all), and bookmark this fic! I’m glad you guys are having as much fun with this as I am.
> 
> Next time: Robin is the true hero of this story managing delicate egos and academic credentials nobody asked about.


	5. After Asculum

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After two agonizing months of almost nonstop work and then a much needed vacation over the holidays, I’m finally back with an update here! I’m hoping to get back to a more regular update schedule going forward, but thank you sincerely to those of you who left kudos and commented on the last chapter! I hope you all had a chance to enjoy the holidays and start 2021 on a positive note.
> 
> 🚨🚨🚨FANART ALERT! Gen_ovah indulged my request for fanart of [a scene from Chapter 4 featuring Boomer and imposter!Berserk](https://www.instagram.com/p/CIOyRKeB8p0/), who was a straight-up villain in that final sequence. I love this art so freaking much! Go check out more of Gen’s art on her instagram.
> 
> ALSO, al.taire drew some [hilarious comic reactions to the last chapter](https://www.instagram.com/p/CHznrZKpwDx/), and the world is blessed to have them. Check out more of Al’s art on instagram too!
> 
> ALSO ALSO! The lovely dreamwalker44 drew[ the Boomer and Berserk conversation scene from Chapter 3](https://dreamwalker44.tumblr.com/post/636136486300958720/the-monsters-swallowed-us-whole-boomer-the). Follow on Tumblr to see more awesome art!

The Dynamo upgrades progressed slowly but steadily. Robin had almost gotten a nosebleed seeing the massive megabot that towered as tall as some sky scrapers. How John had managed to build such a spacious subterranean storage bunker and lab to accommodate Dynamo was a question he only answered with a bemused smile and an _oh, you know, a single father needs a hobby_.

Nobody else had been as stunned by the military-grade setup hiding under the sleepy, suburban neighborhood. Even Princess seemed to know enough about the grade and quality of Dynamo’s ballistics installations to earn Eric’s conciliatory permission to stick around—to which Princess swooned and simpered: “Wow, what a generous offer! After finishing all the cleaning and cooking at home today, I was prepared to spend the rest of it sitting still and staring at the wall.”

Eric’s smile curdled and he stormed off to work on installing an electrolysis oxygen generator in Dyanmo’s hull to prepare the ship for deep space travel.

Hours later, Princess stood next to Robin in the Utonium family backyard sipping a martini unironically at one o’clock in the afternoon as they watched three of the most famously intelligent men in the world take on one very formidable Pit Boss combination grill. Robin would have laughed if the sight wasn’t so tragic.

“It’s not hot,” Eric said, tapping the temperature dial on the lid. “There’s no flame.”

“Did you fill the hopper? Fire cannot burn on mere air and ashes,” Mojo said.

Eric brandished a pair of long, silver tongs. The monkey only came up to the pockets on his borrowed “Kiss the cook—he’s single!” apron. “What an astute observation.”

“Don’t ignite the pellets yet!” John poked his head out from under the enormous outdoor grill, where he was tightening something with a wrench. “I can’t get this darn thing to cooperate. Where did I put the manual…”

“Jesus Christ, how many Ph.D.s does it take to grill a fucking hot dog?” Princess called over to them.

Mojo marched over. “For your information, they are not _hot dogs_ ; they are locally-sourced Vienna bratwurst. The fact that you so much as suggested otherwise is deeply offensive, as well as patently incorrect, not to mention totally _wrong_. In the hierarchy of sausages, the so-called hot dog,” which Mojo put in air quotes as if it were fake news, “is not even at the bottom of the metaphorical pyramid; rather, it lies completely outside, separate, and apart from the wursts and wieners it dares to emulate— _poorly_.”

“Oh god, here we go,” Princess muttered under her breath, but before Robin could get a word in, Mojo blasted on.

“Hot dogs are for suburban, balding husbands shackled to unhappy marriages and drowning in quotidian ennui. They are the stuff of fraternity parties and shockingly inexpensive beer. They are for hooligans who choose to sit for hours in a crowded stadium watching grown men in ridiculous pants throw a ball around for no discernibly useful reason—”

“You look thirsty.” Robin shoved her full glass of lemonade at Mojo before he could finish his sausage demagoguery.

“Ack! You clumsy human!” Mojo fumed over the bit of spilled lemonade growing a dark patch on his cape. “This is Italian velvet and veeeeeeery expensive. I must procure soda water immediately before it is ruined! Direct me accordingly, girl.”

Robin smiled through her fantasy of breaking all the eggs in Mojo’s fridge and leaving the sticky shells in their carton for him to find just before breakfast.

“It’s a ground meat stick, you soggy Chia Pet. Anyway, velvet in June is a cry for help. Think about your choices, seriously.” Princess sipped her martini.

Mojo went red in the face and ripped off his cape in a fit. “Fine, I shall find the soda water _myself_.” He marched back inside.

Robin turned to Princess. “Wow.”

“What?”

Robin bit her tongue. Had Princess just sort of, _kind of_ defended her? “Nothing.” A pause, and then: “Thanks.”

“Well, don’t break a nail doling out all that gratitude.” Princess rolled her eyes and ate her olive off the toothpick.

Meanwhile, Eric threw down his tongs in a fit. “This is absurd! We should be spending our time working on the remaining Dynamo upgrades, not fiddling with this superfluous cooking appliance.”

John looked deeply wounded as he put a reassuring hand on his precious Pit Boss. “This appliance is anything but superfluous; she’s one of the top-ranked combination grills in the country and she makes a mean brisket, I’ll have you know.”

“Well, it’s almost 1:30 in the afternoon and we still haven’t had lunch. I’m starving and I can’t work like this. I’ll just make myself a sandwich in the _actual_ kitchen. You know, the one that came with the house and doesn’t require chicken feed to operate.”

“Chicken feed?! You clearly don’t know the first thing about pellet smokers.”

Eric seethed in his pink apron. “This is _not_ complicated. I could learn this scrap metal’s operation in my sleep, for your information.”

“Oh, really? Well, _be my guest_.” John tossed the thick instruction manual at his cousin and snatched up the tongs he’d cruelly abandoned.

“I would love nothing more.” Eric untied his apron and shoved it at John. He took up the manual and crouched down next to the hopper as John took his place with the food.

“This is the second time they’ve switched places,” Robin said, numb from the constant wave of testosterone and idiocy coming from the two of them. “If they keep challenging each other, we’re never going to eat.”

“Of course we will. I called ahead for catering,” Princess said.

“You’re kidding.”

“Oh, honey.” Princess passed her the bottle of gin that had been chilling in the mini cooler with a level of delicacy reserved for handing out a Most Improved award. “There are some things I never kid about: thread count, Chanel, systemic institutionalized racism in the police force, and catering.”

The frosty gin tasted refreshing going down on this hot day, and for five minutes Robin almost forgot the hour of her life wasted on a monkey and two middle-aged bachelors trying to out-mansplain each other. 

“Ooh, nom nom for us, Robin,” Princess said with a twinkle in her eyes twenty minutes later when the professors had finally gotten the grill working just in time for the caterers to arrive and save the day.

* * *

Walking Brat back to the color wings was not the most awkward situation Blossom had ever found herself in, but it was definitely in the top five. Sweaty and tired from a long day spent training—which consisted mostly of Brat complaining, Brute remaining characteristically laconic, Bubbles being _un_ characteristically quiet, and Blossom losing her temper one and a half times (once for Brat being Brat, half for Butch never showing up)—Blossom was ready for a relaxing, hot shower.

The two Supers walked in silence, which was perhaps the longest Blossom had witnessed Brat remaining silent on purpose. The cool air that rushed out of the foyer raised goosebumps on Blossom’s bare arms, but she barely noticed as her head was elsewhere. She considered saying something: _good job today_ , or _sorry for accidentally freezing your hair earlier_ , or maybe _why do you dislike me so much_? But the exhausted look of consternation on Brat’s face seemed like punishment enough without Blossom going and opening her big mouth. After all, Brat had at least shown up for “team building” and stayed as long as Blossom wanted to keep going; Butch hadn’t even bothered making an appearance.

By the time they got to the palatial arboretum, Blossom couldn’t abide the festering silence anymore. She took a deep breath and opened her mouth—

“Just ‘cause you got lucky doesn’t mean shit,” Butch’s voice carried as he emerged from the first Challenge Room at the top of the stairs, shirtless and sweaty and a little scorched.

“You’re the one who said best two out of three.” Brick followed him out, equally bare-chested as he wiped the sweat from his face with his red shirt. “Blossom.” Red eyes flickered from Blossom to Brat before settling back on Blossom, stopped now at the foot of the concrete stairs.

“Brick,” Blossom returned, grateful for the distraction. And then at her absent teammate: “Where were you today?”

Butch sauntered right up to her, unflinching under her undivided attention. “Workin’ out, you know. Hey, Brat.”

Brat flinched like she’d just been jostled out of a daydream. She wrinkled her nose in distaste and put up her hands. “Um, ew.”

“I mean, why weren’t you training with us?” Blossom demanded with a little more composure than her companion. In fairness, however, Butch reeked of an old gym bag. He had an ugly, yellowish bruise across his chest that should have healed by now, unless the injury was much worse than it looked.

Butch chuckled. “Yeah, sorry. I was totally going to, but Brick was whining about how nobody here’s worth getting outta bed for, so you know.” He slid his gaze to Brat. “Nice ink.”

Brat hastily closed her fingers around her wrist, where Blossom caught the looping edges of a tattoo peeking out. She hadn’t noticed it until now. Brat still looked like she needed prune juice, but her edges softened just a little at the compliment. Butch’s own geometric-patterned tattoos proudly sheathed the length of his left arm.

“Excuse me.” Brick side-stepped Brat and his brother.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Brat said, more tired than annoyed at Butch’s prodding. “Just some design.”

“Cool,” Butch said.

Blossom looked between a slowly retreating Brick and her team. She really wanted that shower. “I want you outside training with us tomorrow morning, Butch. No excuses, okay?” She didn’t stick around to hear his response as she jogged to catch up with Brick. He was headed in the direction of their wing, but he lingered on the other end of the arboretum until she joined him.

“I hear I ruined your training plans,” he said as they fell into step.

“Do you actually care?” Blossom asked.

“Just trying to make conversation.”

“Try harder.”

He let out a sharp breath, amused.

“Seriously, Brick. Brat and I made some good progress today, but we need Butch to make this work the way it’s supposed to.”

“Butch is a grown ass man. He can make his own decisions. It’s not my fault he chose me over you.”

They’d come to the stairs leading up to the second floor color wings and stopped. His wrist was hot to the touch in Blossom’s hand as she bade him stay and hear her.

“This is your only warning,” she said. “I won’t tell you how to manage your team, so please don’t get in the way of mine.”

Blossom braced herself for an argument, but he surprised her with something much worse as he leaned into her personal space. “Consider me thoroughly castigated.”

The glimmer of mirth in his eyes rankled her nerves and sparked an incredible urge to start a fight despite her exhaustion. By the time she came to grips with her roiling emotions, Brick was already halfway up the stairs to the second floor landing. The sight of his retreating back was as sobering as it was tempting, and as she followed him up, she wrestled with an emotion she had not felt in years. Rare were the times Blossom felt the desire to use her powers for the sheer, violent delight of it, but these days living in close quarters with both her obstreperous counterparts could fray even the iciest of nerves.

But as with everything that had ever transpired between Brick and Blossom since they were children, this too was a competition. One he was currently winning.

Quiet, she caught up to him at the lacquered entrance to the Red Wing, and as he opened the door, she grabbed the edge and slipped in ahead of him. “The next time you feel like losing a fight, consider challenging someone in your own league.”

It was warmer in the Red Wing than it was in the hall, and Blossom made a beeline for the bar for a glass of water and a moment to enjoy her last word.

Brick stood in her path when she turned around. Despite her best efforts up until this point, it was impossible not to notice the excellent care he took of his physique when he was right in front of her. “Someone in my own league?” he asked with a taunting _I know exactly what I’m doing_ lilt in his tone.

Blossom was back in her last day on Earth before her alien abduction, on the date that had fallen flat before it had even really begun. He’d been cute, Chad or Brad or whatever his name was, good on paper but vapid and forgettable in person. He was a hundred years in the past now, galaxies away, but she was sure any transient physical encounter with him would have at least resulted in an A for effort.

She squashed those thoughts with a force that physically startled her, as though Brick might hear them and think less of her, somehow. As if that mattered (it did not). “In case you need the proper motivation to get out of bed again,” she said.

Blossom sipped her water. Brick hesitated. Somewhere in the cosmos, lead turned to gold, a pig took flight, and Blossom was _living_.

Brick’s fingers were warm where they brushed hers as he took the glass from her hand without asking. “Or rather, to get back in.” 

Tragically too late, Blossom regretted exactly every decision she had made in the last twenty minutes—from checking out Brick’s chest as he emerged from the Challenge Room (not her fault), to following that chest back here (they were roommates), to “thoroughly castigated” (help), to her ill-inspired decision to flirt her way to victory because if the other day’s library tension was anything to go by, surely Brick would back down from _that_ challenge. Either he was even pettier than she was, or he was serious.

He then proceeded to drink her water in the sexiest way possible, and Blossom had a chilling thought: was Brick _better_ at this than her? And even more alarming: was this fun?

“Jesus Christ, can you _not_ for five fucking minutes?”

Berserk’s sudden exclamation startled Brick so badly that he choked and began hacking up a lung over the sink. The glass shattered on the floor, which startled Blossom enough to make her jump, and she automatically patted Brick’s back as he coughed.

“Are you okay?” she asked Brick. Then: “Berserk, where were you all day?”

Her cousin looked like she’d gotten in a fight, a deduction confirmed when Berserk slammed a large, triple-bit key on the bar counter. “Not eye-boning my counterpart, obviously.”

Blossom frosted over. “Okay, wow.”

Brick recovered from his fit and snatched the Challenge Room Key. “Where did you get this?” he demanded, wiping his mouth.

“A Challenge Room. Are you slow?” Berserk spat.

“Wait a minute,” Blossom said. “You fought a monster? Were Boomer and Buttercup with you? Why didn’t you tell us?”

“Maybe because I didn’t want to hear you nagging and micromanaging my shit.”

Blossom flinched at the venom in her voice. Berserk was no summer peach, but she was particularly vituperative tonight for no reason. Before Blossom could confront her about it, Brick slipped the Challenge Room Key in his pants pocket and jumped over the bar top.

Berserk exploded. “Hey, where the hell do you think you’re going with that?”

Not one to be intimidated, Brick met her ire with his own. “My room. Problem?”

“I’m about to shove my problem up your ass if you don’t give me back my key, Boy Toy.”

Before either of them could spontaneously self-immolate and ruin the furniture, Blossom got in between them. “Whoa, dial it back. Why are you so angry—”

Pain burst in Blossom’s face where Berserk suddenly and without provocation punched her in the nose. She saw stars briefly, and a heated struggle ensued somewhere beyond her spinning head. After the pain receded in a matter of seconds, she opened her eyes in time to watch Berserk syphon Brick’s fire along her shoulders like a cape and shove him with all her strength. Flames popped and hair burned. Brick caught his balance and Berserk’s wrist, yanked her close enough to grasp her neck, and slammed her onto the floor.

“Back. _Off_ ,” he hissed through the oily, black smoke slithering out of the corners of his mouth.

Shamelessly bold, Berserk slapped her hand over his mouth and took him by surprise. That one second of shock was all she needed to roll him over and pound his head against the concrete floor beneath her. She heaved, raging like Blossom had never seen her before.

Her body moved on instinct. She wasn’t sure when she’d even summoned her ice, but it coated her fists when she punched Berserk with her full strength. The sofa caught Berserk and did not survive the landing in one piece as they both slid into the far wall and fused to it under a sheet of ice. Brick was on his feet in an instant and going for Berserk again, but Berserk manipulated the ice gluing her to the wall just in time to catch Brick’s fiery fist in her icy hand with a sickening sizzle.

“This ends now!” Blossom bellowed, inspired to lose her temper for real.

“Fuck off, Blossom,” Berserk said.

Raw heat sloughed off Brick’s bare shoulders so thick it could have asphyxiated them all. “Say one more goddamned word.”

For the second time since they had arrived on this planet, Blossom feared for her life. In this X-saturated atmosphere, Trinity House was dry kindling under Brick and Berserk’s combined power. If they didn’t let up, they could kill each other before Blossom had time to break them apart again.

By some inner grace, they did let up. Almost as soon as it had begun, the skirmish came to a swift and seething end.

“This is how we get out!” Brick brandished the iron Challenge Room Key in Berserk’s face. “By figuring out what this unlocks, _we all benefit_. Un-fucking-believable.”

Berserk’s magenta eyes fixed on Brick unblinking, like some deep-sea fish staring into the abyss. “Fine, take it. But remember that it’s mine. I won it, not you.” She disappeared into her room in a blaze of light, and the door slammed shut behind her.

Blossom followed, but she didn’t make it far.

“Where the hell are you going?” Brick demanded.

“To talk to her.”

“ _Why_?”

“Because something’s clearly wrong.”

Brick snorted. “Yeah, she ran out of Xanax.”

Blossom ignored him and quietly opened Berserk’s door. “Can I come in, please?”

No answer. Blossom let herself in the dark room and closed the door behind her. Moonlight filtered through the narrow stained glass window over the neatly made twin bed. Berserk sat on the bed with her back to Blossom and her knees pulled up to her chest. She was still and silent. If not for her Super hearing, Blossom would have thought she wasn’t even breathing.

A cloud passed and the glass-tinted moonlight rippled blue down Berserk’s back. It struck her then how small her cousin was, shorter than her and curled on her bed like a callow teenager stood-up on her first date. Blossom searched for some words of comfort, but found nothing but platitudes. Two women alike in power and status, bonded by blood and chemicals, practically mirror images of each other, and they were nearly strangers.

Blossom wished for Bubbles’ empathy and for Buttercup’s endurance, but all she had was her own experience. “I know you probably don’t want to talk to me about it,” she said.

Berserk’s long hair fluttered over her shoulder as she shifted under the undulating light. Blossom felt as though they were buried deep underwater, beneath miles of pressure and waves, and her words had nowhere to go but deeper into the silt.

“But you should talk to someone,” Blossom said, barely a whisper. “Anyone.”

Not even a tranquil “shut up”.

Blossom bit her lip and opened the door to leave, but it felt wrong. She turned back and found Berserk looking right at her. The cloud had passed and the blue moonlight illuminated a dusky violet in her eyes. “Leave,” she commanded.

Blossom left.

* * *

Brute curled her fingers in the thick, black grass as she gazed up at the three moons orbiting this planet. A light breeze brought reprieve from the day’s swelter, and in the distance the black sea caressed the shoreline in a rhythmic lapping that was kind of peaceful. She wished she had a cigarette; Butch and Buttercup would probably be fucking for a while longer.

“Do you think we’ll ever get off this stupid planet?” Brat lay flat on her back in the grass next to Brute, strangely subdued. Blossom had gone hard on her in their training today.

Brute inhaled the night air. It smelled like freesia and mint. She wondered if Mrs. Morales next door would water her plants while she was gone. “Yeah.”

“Do you think it’ll be soon?”

“Nah.”

Brat turned over on her belly and picked at the grass. “Yeah, probably not with our shitty luck.”

Brute stared at the middle moon. It was white and pockmarked, just like the moon back home. A faint halo surrounded it and its sister moons that warned of rain. There were a few clouds in the sky. Hopefully the rain would hold off until she was back inside.

“I had the dream again,” Brat said.

Brute eyed her baby sister askance. She’d gotten ahold of a little flower and twirled it in her fingers like a lady’s parasol.

“Boomer and Bubbles saw it too.”

“How?” Brute asked.

“It’s that stupid House. I can’t even dream by myself in there. My whole life is just there for them to pick and choose from a menu. Like a spooky buffet line of my worst memories and secrets.” Brat looked up at her. In the moonlight at this angle, she looked so much like she used to when they were little and she would sneak into Brute’s bedroom and crawl under the covers in search of a hand to hold. The first time she’d done it was when she’d had a nightmare that she’d floated deep into space in her sleep and was lost forever, convinced that so long as one of her sisters held onto her she’d never drift away.

“It’s just a dream,” Brute said.

Brat spun her flower. “I know.” After a long pause, she asked: “Have you talked to her?”

Brute would have had more luck talking to the wind. “No.”

“Do you think we should—”

“No.”

Brat dropped it finally, but not really. Brute would have to keep a closer eye on her, just in case. Just until they were back home in their normal lives without any unnecessary distractions.

“So why are you out here hiding? Don’t tell me you’re sharing dreams with Butch and Buttercup too,” Brat said.

“I’d already be dead from second-hand stupidity.”

That got a little snicker out of Brat. “So what, then?”

“Just getting some air,” Brute said.

“Ew, do you guys share a room too? This is a major violation of privacy. You and me should just sleep out here.”

“Asterion said we have to sleep in our rooms.”

“Who the hell is Asterion?”

“The automaton.”

“It has a name? How do you even know that?”

“I asked.”

Brat looked profoundly troubled as she resumed twirling her flower. She managed a commendable two full minutes of silence. “I hate them.”

“Why?”

Brat scoffed. “They think they’re so much better than me. It’s so toxic in there, like I literally cannot. Ugh, and today Boomer came back all beat up, and when Bubbles asked him about it he went all emo silent treatment. It’s like I’m in a CW show, but like, nobody’s hot and everybody sucks. I mean, except you, obviously.”

“Thanks.”

Brat picked the petals off the flower she’d grown tired of twirling, and Brute watched her count them silently.

 _He loves me, he loves me not,_ she used to chant to herself, cheating every time to make sure her last petal brought the reassurance she craved.

Brute wondered if their creator was looking for them. If he even knew they were missing.

“Do you think Eric will come for us?” Brat asked.

Brute sighed and lay back next to her sister. “Maybe.”

Brat decapitated her flower and tossed it aside. She rolled onto her back and lay shoulder to shoulder with Brute. “Yeah. Maybe.”

Brat’s hand found Brute’s and squeezed tight. They stayed that way for a little while, staring up at the alien constellations and lulled by the hum of the distant sea. Eventually, their vigil came to an end when Asterion showed up.

“Shall I escort you to your rooms?” it offered with a gesture.

Brat muttered some obscenity under her breath as Brute tugged her into a standing position.

“We’ll manage,” Brute said.

The automaton bowed. “Please do not dally. The hour is late.” It watched them go, but did not follow.

“That thing gives me the creeps,” Brat complained as they floated through the House back toward the living quarters. “Like, how did it know we were out there?”

Brute shrugged. More importantly, she wondered how tired her counterparts were and if the rest of the night in the Green Wing would pass in peace or not.

Brat prattled on. “I think it's these bracelets. I bet they’re trackers or something.” She fiddled with the silver band on her wrist, identical to Brute’s. “Like the other night, I was totally minding my own business and it was just standing there watching me like a dirty old man. Just totally silent.”

“Did it say anything?” Brute asked as they ascended to the second floor past the arboretum.

Brat crossed her arms. “No. It was super weird. I just ended up going back to my room. At least it doesn’t follow us in there.” She made a sour face.

“Get some sleep.”

“Pass. I took a nap earlier. No way I’m risking getting sucked into whatever sad boy crap Boomer’s wallowing in.”

Brute waited until Brat closed the door to the Blue Wing behind her to head back to her room. Before she went in, she turned back and spotted Asterion standing at the entrance to the hall, watching her through sightless eyes. The automaton didn’t move. It may as well have been a pewter statue.

Brute waved.

“Good night, Sourcerer,” Asterion’s hollow voice reverberated to her through the walls.

Only when she heard the heavy click of the Green Wing’s door closing behind her did she let out the breath she’d been holding in.

* * *

It was half past fuck-all and Berserk didn’t encounter a soul wandering the dark halls of Trinity House hours after Blossom had left her room. Space sucked, but the whiskey was decent now that she was a third of the way through the bottle she’d filched. Having spent much of her time exploring the House, she thought she’d created a navigable mental map. But when she landed on a high rampart in the arboretum that should have taken her to the second Challenge Room, the hall instead led to an unfamiliar room full of empty picture frames on all the walls.

“Okay,” Berserk said, turning back around.

The balcony twisted around a sharp corner that would take her to the grand staircase overlooking the entrance hall. But when she got to the top of the stairs, they spiraled down a windowless shaft she didn’t recognize and the entrance hall was nowhere to be found. Berserk peered down the well and listened, but the only sound was her own stomach rumbling softly. She’d skipped dinner.

A gulp of whiskey went down without protest, and Berserk went down the stairs with a skip. Her magenta glow illuminated the glossy, black walls as she hummed a tuneless song to herself. The lower she went, the warmer it grew. She paused to tie her jacket around her waist and take another swig. A look up revealed threads of moonlight winding down after her through the mouth of the stairwell, stories above. She reached her hand up and the translucent beams seeped through her fingertips like fishing line. She reached higher, and the incline and her lean upended her balance and sent her stumbling to the step below, but the power of flight kept her upright. Whiskey sloshed out of the bottle and coated her fingers.

A giggle escaped her lips and echoed up the stairwell, tiny air bubbles racing to the surface. Below lay unknown darkness and ever more stairs, and she was a single female alone at night. Berserk raised her bottle in a toast. “Yolo, bitch.”

Down and around she drained, humming to herself in between sips, and it was fucking bliss. In such a huge, empty place, there was paradoxically little peace and no quiet among the nine Supers no matter where she went. But now she danced in circles and serenaded herself like no one was watching!

The bottom gave when she landed in a wash of tidal light streaming in through the stained windows. Fathoms below, and yet she’d been here before. At the end of the pulsing corridor, the silver mirror she’d unlocked just this morning rippled at her approach.

Well, now the House was just being cheeky.

Berserk took one last, long sip of whiskey before tossing the bottle aside. She wiped her lips, feeling lighter than gravity, and she stepped through the Challenge Room portal just as the slick, porous walls closed behind her.

The Challenge Room was much as she remembered it with its disco ball walls and calcified light, dulled now to a muddy, sapphire haze that reminded her it was sad bitch o’clock. She laughed, and the walls laughed back and away. The nearest one was a jagged jigsaw puzzle that reflected nothing back at her, not even her own reflection.

“Knock, knock.” She rapped her knuckles on the wall. Nobody was home.

It occurred to her that she’d killed herself in here, but that was _ages_ ago.

Berserk sighed dramatically and raked her nails across the shattered wall. “Come ooooon, you pussy.”

The wrong Trinity House sprawled before her, unfurling like a mouth paved with glittering glass. The grey arboretum tree and its metastatic fruit gave off a fetid stench that nonetheless tempted her whiskey-laden stomach. The fountain Buttercup had smashed in their fight lay in its pieces, and a black sea now submerged the entrance hall where it had bled out. Tiny mirror shards shimmered upon the water’s inky surface.

“I know you’re there,” Berserk crooned as she floated over the flood of fallen stars. The walls were slick with condensation. It was abominably warm in here. The wall she’d crawled out of strangling her imposter glowed the same drowned blue as the rest of this chamber. She floated unsteadily over to it and peered deep into the glass, but there was no reflection there at all.

“Talk to someone, she says,” Berserk muttered. “Can’t talk to the fucking wall.”

The moments floating passed like the trickle of a leaky faucet, slow and more excruciating the longer she listened to the sound of nothing. Talk to someone, anyone, but there was no one. No earnest boy, no monsters in the mirror, no one to left to blame.

Berserk pressed her palm against the slippery wall. With her Super strength, she could crack it. She could break this whole place if she wanted to, and it would be nothing to her, mean nothing.

“I won,” she said through her teeth as the glass blurred. “I fucking won.”

She closed her bleary eyes and breathed through her mouth. Her tongue was too big and all she could taste was gasoline. It was as muggy as an armpit in here and she was going to be sick. But hey, at least she’d won.

_Just like old times._

Berserk closed her fist against the wall and gathered her bearings. Blinking, she breached the surface of her swimming vision and pushed her damp bangs from her face. In the glass, a new figure stared back at her through one blighted eye. _A nightmare_ , the whiskey posited. But his hand was ice cold on hers when he reached for her through the glass, and she yelped.

The stagnant X water was as thick and warm as soup when she landed in it with a thunderous splash and looked up at her shadowy oppressor. He smiled down at her, and the thick scar bisecting his cheek stretched like a slow-moving earthworm looking for a hole to burrow in.

“Not you,” she said, shivering and small.

The wraith tapped his gloved finger against the translucent portal. The glass fractured beneath his finger, and Berserk screeched like one possessed. She leaped from the glossy tar pit, incandescent, and put everything she had into her magenta blasters. Her maker’s silent visage splintered with a smile, shattered, and turned to dust, and her X burned through it all. In the span of a heartbeat, she had pulverized the wall to a jagged hole beneath the grand staircase. From the hundred carved prism faces that remained, only her own familiar reflections stared back at her now, sodden and shaking with a black hatred she had not indulged in years with nowhere to go.

Wet and devastatingly sobered, Berserk wallowed in the drowned chamber crowded with her copies, and there she remained alone and victorious.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shout out to my nonpareil beta, Mordor, for all his work and support up to and including this chapter!
> 
> Next time: Brick finally gets his shot at a Challenge Room and learns that teamwork makes the dream work! (Lol no he doesn’t, it’s a disaster, obviously.)


	6. Hey Pretty

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So my plan for more regular updates was a load of bullshit, clearly. Sorry, everybody! I’m trying to work on this as much as I can, but sometimes work gets in the way. I hope you enjoy this belated update.
> 
> 🚨🚨🚨FANART ALERT! The fantabulous gen_ovah has done it again, this time with [Chapter 5 Reds flirting moments before disaster](https://www.instagram.com/p/CKbpJmChK92/). Go pay your thirsty respects directly on Instagram!
> 
> Also, dreamwalker44 is back with[ more of my best girl Berserk](https://dreamwalker44.tumblr.com/post/641637762808823808/some-beserk-doodles-based-on-renaerys-s) looking forever better than everyone else. Support her on Tumblr and Instagram!

When Bubbles woke up to dawn’s first rays, Boomer was already slipping his boots on, his hair damp from a shower. “You’re up early,” she said.

Boomer grunted an acknowledgment, but he remained focused on his task.

Bubbles slipped out of bed in her pajamas and put a hand on his shoulder. “Hey, seriously. Please talk to me.”

“I don’t really want to talk about it right now,” he said, rising with hardly a look in her direction.

She followed him toward the door. “Okay, then at least let me be there for you. I just want to help— _Boomer_.”

He paused at the door and glanced back at her. The glimmer of longing in his eyes, lonely and far away, tugged at old heartstrings.

“I saw your dream,” Bubbles said, recalling the garish colors and sensation of burning, fragments of a picture she couldn’t quite make out beyond pain and a pair of cold, magenta eyes.

“Then you know it’s not anything you can help with,” he said, soft but firm.

“I won’t accept that.”

“Well, you gave up that right a long time ago.”

Bubbles flinched, and Boomer winced at his harsh tone. He looked like he wanted to say more, but instead he turned from her, muttering an apology and something about breakfast, and headed out.

Bubbles wrung her hands, her fingers spinning the golden ring on her finger. Not for the first time, she wished she could talk to Robin. She always seemed to know what to say to cut through the bullshit and allay Bubbles’ worries and fears. But her wife was not here; Bubbles was going to have to navigate this well-trodden path on her own. When she turned back into the room, Brat was leaning against the bathroom doorway with a toothbrush hanging from her mouth, watching.

“Ouch, friend zoned much?” Brat said around her toothbrush.

Bubbles shot her a dirty look. “Don’t be nasty. And anyway, Boomer and I _are_ friends.”

Brat laughed and retreated back into the bathroom. “If you say so.”

 _We are_ , Bubbles thought to herself as she quickly dressed for the day. Whatever was going on with Boomer, he would surely come around.

Hopefully.

* * *

A whole day he’d had the new Challenge Room Key, and still Brick had not figured out how to use the damn thing. He’d been over every inch of the House it seemed, and no mystical door appeared, no vortex or shimmering barrier manifested. The clunky, iron key appeared to be anything but special, and the only challenge it unlocked was the eternal struggle between Brick’s sanity and his boiling point.

It had gotten to the point where he even tried asking Blossom for help.

“Well, the library door just appeared when I approached it with my Key,” she said as she stretched ahead of the day’s physical training and team building with Brat and Butch. “Have you tried touching the walls with it?”

“Do you honestly think I wouldn’t have tried that rather obvious idea before asking you?”

Blossom punched the air inches from his ear without warning. He remained unmoving as he held her gaze. This close, he could see the irritated twitch of her lips, smell the shower soap on her skin.

She retracted, turned, and punched away from him. “Sounds like you’re stumped.”

“No, I just haven’t tried everything.”

She dropped into a lunge to stretch her hamstring, and his gaze followed the path of her tank top creeping up over the small of her back. “You could try asking Berserk,” she said.

He scoffed. “I’ve barely even seen her since she interrupted us in a psychotic rage the other night. And even if I had, I doubt she’d be amenable to helping me with anything.”

Blossom paused her stretching and stood upright. She had a look of heated curiosity as she stared back at him. When she bit her lip, something vulnerable and afraid in him snapped, and he cleared his throat to break the spell.

“Sorry,” she said hastily for no reason at all. She averted her gaze and rested her chin in her hand. “Now that you mention it, I haven’t seen much of her since then either.”

“Ready, Madam Leader?” Butch landed in the grass next to Blossom with a flourish, shirtless and sweaty. The day was hot and it would only get hotter. Already, Butch looked worn and ragged, as if he’d spent the entire night previous training hard.

“Hm? Oh, yeah, just a moment. Where’s Brat?”

“Uh, she was here a minute ago…”

Brick knew he wasn’t going to get anything more out of Blossom, so he turned to go.

“Hey, wait.” Blossom caught the back of his jacket and tugged him back. “What will you do?”

“I’ll figure something out,” he said.

“Well, okay. Just promise me you won’t do whatever you’re going to do alone.”

 _That’s none of your business_ , he might have said, or _don’t tell me what to do_ , or even nothing at all. But there was no mocking in her tone. The weight of her hand bunched in his jacket tugged, oddly reassuring. He frowned and carded his fingers through his hair. “Yeah, fine.”

Blossom’s smile was as soft as it was unexpected.

“Are we doing this stupid training or what? I can think of ten other things I’d rather be doing than this, so just say the word and I’m totally out of here,” Brat said. She hovered over Butch and Blossom looking as sour as ever.

“We’re doing it,” Blossom said, the warmth gone from her voice as she slipped back into business mode.

Brat’s narrowed eyes shifted to Brick and she crossed her arms. He frowned and shoved his hands in his pockets. It was high time he got the hell out of here.

“Butch, I see you’ve already gotten a head start?” Blossom said, making her way back to him.

Butch rubbed the back of his neck, revealing a long, misshapen bruise down his left flank. “Eh, somethin’ like that…”

Brick didn’t stick around to hear the rest of their conversation and headed back the way he’d come. The grounds surrounding Trinity House were sprawling and immaculate. Every hedge was trimmed to right angles, not a smear of dirt marred the stone pathways, and even the garden’s black roses and glossy ferns grew in orderly bunches around the Source pond. It was there that he spotted Boomer, who he would have approached and recruited for this wild goose chase if Buttercup wasn’t there with him. They kept their voices too low even for Brick’s Super hearing to make out all the words, but there was a weary edge to the conversation, as if they had been going in circles about some age-old argument. From the battered state of them, he deduced they’d been sparring for the better part of the morning.

Their officious team leader, however, was nowhere to be seen.

Brick retreated back the way he’d come before either of them could spot him. Whenever possible, it was always best to avoid any interaction with Blossom’s ornery sister.

The silver bangle on his wrist warmed as he crossed the main threshold back inside the House, and he paused to examine the strange bauble. Could it, like everything else on this planet, be powered by Chemical X? On a whim, he channeled combustive power through his fingers as he gripped it tighter until the air began to shimmer.

“Please refrain from tampering with your tag.” The automaton appeared on the grand staircase, stock still as it watched him.

Brick twitched in surprise. He hadn’t noticed the thing was even here. Even now, as he strained his ears, he detected no heartbeat pounding behind its metal chest, no lungs constricting with each breath; there was only the low rattle of metal, like gears turning, as subtle as a stomach growl.

“Where the hell did you come from?” Brick demanded.

“Oh, Asterion, there you are!” Bubbles appeared through the second floor entrance. “I was wondering if I could get some snacks for our room…” She trailed off when she saw Brick standing there. “Brick?”

The Challenge Room Key was a dead weight in his pocket. He slipped his hand around it and clenched hard, recalling his promise to Blossom not to do this alone. “Bubbles. Any chance you’ve seen Brute anywhere?”

Twenty minutes later, Brick, Bubbles, Brute, and Asterion were gathered together in the arboretum. None of them were happy to be there.

“This better be good,” Brute said, as pleasant as curdled milk. She looked bone-weary and hollow, like she hadn’t slept well in days.

Brick ignored her and produced the Challenge Room Key. “I need to find whatever this opens,” he said.

Bubbles gasped. “Where did you get that?”

“Berserk handed it over.”

“Did she,” Brute said.

Brick ignored them as he interrogated the automaton. “Tell me how to open the next Challenge Room.”

“I am unable to fulfill your request,” it responded.

“What do you mean, you’re unable?” Brick asked. “You can’t, or you won’t?”

“There is no difference.”

Brute turned on her heel and walked away.

“Hey, wait!” Bubbles called to her.

Brick grabbed the automaton around its neck and shoved it hard against the concrete wall. Its short legs dangled, but it did not struggle.

“Brick!” Bubbles gasped. “What do you think you're doing?”

He channeled heat from his palm the same way he had done with the silver bangle. “I’ve been doing some light reading,” he said casually. “The soil composition of this planet essentially replaces nitrogen and other elements essential to life on Earth with Source, and the result is exponential in every way—mutational, metastatic, beyond natural limitations. I wonder.” He increased his pressure and power. Heat shimmered up and down his arm, and the wall behind Asterion charred black as the cement began to boil and emit a rancid smoke. “How has consuming food grown on this planet, drinking its water, breathing its air extended my limits?”

Asterion’s mercurial face warped and rippled. It began to struggle in Brick’s hold.

“You can’t break,” he went on, making no effort to hide the effect of his power flaming off his skin and glazing his eyes, “but can you melt?”

“Brick, please,” Bubbles said. “Stop this.”

He pushed harder, and Asterion’s misshapen head thrashed as chunks of it sloughed away and melded with the wall. They sank in like water through a sponge, buoyed on Brick’s power, and for a moment he felt himself in those walls, a part of them, meshing and expanding into something huge and growling and alive beneath the cold cement.

Bold hands wrenched him by his elbows, breaking his concentration and his connection to Asterion. He stumbled back, breathing hard.

“Oh my god,” Bubbles said, but she wasn’t talking to him. “Are you all right?”

Brute’s hands smoked as her flesh cooked where she’d grabbed Brick, and Bubbles held her wrists. Chemical X did its work to heal them quickly, but her blood on the floor was a bright bloom of color against the wash of grey and white. Brick could not help but stare at Brute’s steaming palms as her blood evaporated under the lingering effects of his power.

She caught him staring and barely reacted. Never in Brick’s life had he met anyone who better embodied the stone cold bitch persona. A statue could have acted the part better than Berserk’s boulder of a sister.

The stone cold bitch clenched her fists to hide her tender palms. “Fine.”

In his distraction, Brick lost track of Asterion. All that was left of their metallic host was a bubbling scorch mark on the cement slowly shrinking as the House repaired itself.

“I am unable to open the Challenge Room for you.” Across the arboretum under the great, black tree with its swollen fruit, Asterion had rematerialized intact. “However, I can offer a suggestion.”

Unbreakable and un-meltable so long as it had that pesky ability to absorb back into the House. Shit odds. But even Antaeus had met his match when Heracles crushed him to death just out of his mother’s reach.

Brick studied the automaton perched at the top of the stairs well out of reach. “By all means.”

Asterion gestured for them to follow.

“Let’s go,” Brick addressed his wary teammates.

They followed, of course. Bubbles was too concerned with other people ever to leave them to their own devices, and Brute had already interfered unnecessarily once—to back out now would be a wasted effort, craven and unprincipled. Even frigid assholes like Brute had their pride.

Asterion led them down a corridor Brick had explored before to no avail.

“I’ve already been here,” he said. “It’s a dead end.”

“You have not been here before,” it said.

Brick produced the Challenge Room Key, while Bubbles approached the solid wall.

“I don’t see a door,” she said, running her hands over the seamless cement.

Brute grabbed the Key from Brick’s hands before he could stop her. “Hey!”

She marched over to Bubbles and pressed it against the wall. Nothing happened.

Brick dashed to the wall in a blaze. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“You’ve been here before,” Bubbles said. Her blue eyes met his, wide with wonderment. “ _You’ve_ been here before, but we haven’t.”

Brute grabbed his hand and slammed it against the wall in between hers and Bubbles’, and the cement changed. Ridges crested and rippled down the wall in waves, breaking over each other in a delicate, winding pattern. The Key melted into the wall before anyone could think to grab it, but the door that materialized unlocked with a welcoming click.

Within: red.

The glare drained through the shadows in the corners, leaving only a triangular conference table and smooth, concrete walls boxing them in. Hanging above the table on the back wall of the small room was a crumbling painting.

“This is it?” Brute said, unimpressed.

Brick floated to examine the defaced painting. The skeleton key it depicted was a delicate, brass piece with a chunk missing from its bow set against a spiraling staircase backdrop. He touched his fingers to it, surprised to feel the same concrete texture as the rest of the House. The painting had been done directly on the wall, including the frame. He noted the skill of the artist. It had looked so real when he first walked into the Challenge Room.

“Hey, look at this,” Bubbles called. She was leaning over the table where a discrete section of the concrete protruded in the shape of a box. When she touched it, it crumbled to dust, revealing colorful pieces.

Brute’s lips twitched. “A puzzle.”

Brick floated down to join them as Bubbles began separating the small, slivered pieces. “So… Our challenge is to do a puzzle?” she asked.

Brick swiped one of the pieces. It was concrete and painted and the size of a quarter. “Great.”

Brute shared his gushing enthusiasm by crushing one of the pieces in her fist. The dust reformed where it fell as if in reverse time, perfect. For a breath, the three of them looked across the table at each other and accepted that yeah, their scary, dimensional challenge was nothing but a fucking coffee table puzzle.

Bubbles sighed. “Well, hey, on the bright side, we don’t have to risk our lives fighting an alien monster.”

Brute looked at her with the dead-eyed listlessness of one who has just sat through all eight Fast & Furious movies back to back.

“What?” Bubbles said, sheepish.

Brick set the piece he’d selected back down on the table and willed himself not to have a coronary. _Don’t go alone_ , she’d said. Blossom would surely be the last one laughing when he told her about this joke of a challenge tonight over drinks. And he couldn’t wait to tell Berserk what a dud her Key had been after all the stupid crap she’d put him through to get it.

“All right, let’s just get this over with.” Brick took a seat in the chair nearest to him, and Bubbles sat down across from him, pulling pieces toward her to arrange. When Brute didn’t budge, Brick fixed her with a pointed look. “Not a team player today?”

If looks could kill, Brute had the art down to a slow-burn torture involving ball clamps, probably. And yet, in an astounding show of petulance Brick may have found funny if they weren’t stuck together in a cramped pocket dimension doing a _fucking coffee table puzzle_ , Brute said, “Shut up.”

She sank into her chair to complete the triangle and began to pick out pieces in absolutely the most sullen way possible. Well, if she wanted to hit something that badly, perhaps Asterion would still be hanging out when they got out of here in about five minutes.

When five minutes later they had solved the simple puzzle and Brick pressed the fused tile against the hole in the painting, all hopes of a consolation pounding crumbled along with another section of the art. A new box sprouted from the table and dissolved to reveal more pieces in need of puzzling. Of course it wouldn’t be so easy. From Blossom’s account of her team’s monster fight and Berserk’s unspoken rage trauma after whatever the hell she and her team had faced (which, not even Boomer wanted to talk about when Brick had asked him in passing), there was no way Brick’s challenge would be any less daunting.

But as his team completed puzzles, pieced together the painting, and restarted the process over and over and _over_ again, the challenge became less daunting and more annoying.

“There have to be at least a hundred pieces here,” Bubbles marveled as she arranged the tiny concrete chips in front of her.

“Less counting, more puzzling,” Brick said, because this was his joke of a life now and there was no god.

Brute snorted, and bored to death, Brick couldn’t help himself. “What.”

“Nothing,” she said.

The sound of clicking puzzle tiles and mouth-breathing and Bubbles humming low under her breath were driving Brick slowly mad.

He passed Bubbles a few pieces he’d fit together.

She examined them, broke them apart, and refitted them correctly with a new piece she’d pulled from her pile.

Brute snorted again, and Brick dropped the piece he’d been handling. “What,” he demanded again.

“No comment,” she insisted.

“If you have something to say, just say it.”

Brute remained mum. She passed Bubbles a few pieces correctly assembled, but Bubbles was too preoccupied watching the two of them to add it to the growing design in the middle of the table.

An uneasy cadence descended on the trio. Tile pieces smacked the concrete. Bubbles had ceased humming, but now she was watching Brick and Brute like they were two of her kindergarteners about to get a time out.

At length, Brute went for the jugular. “You just seem a bit tense.”

Brick threw the piece he’d been holding on the pile Bubbles had amassed and shot out of his chair. The temperature in the room spiked as he momentarily lost control of his powers, and he sucked in a harsh breath to rein himself in. He stepped away from the table to face the wall and reminded himself that it was just this cramped room, just this insufferable tedium, just two strangers he’d dragged in here with him against his will because Blossom just _had_ to make a reasonable fucking point.

“Brick—” Bubbles said.

“I need a minute,” Brick snapped at her, regretting his tone but not enough to risk his temper. He paced to the other end of the room as far as humanly possible from the two women and leaned his palms on the cold, concrete wall.

_It’s December. I’m alone in the woods, and it’s snowing. I can feel it on my cheeks, big cotton ball flakes, freezing and melting. It smells like pine and stars here. There’s no one around, and I’m alone. I’m alone. I’m alone._

He had pictured the peaceful winter scene in his mind a thousand times on his therapist’s suggestion. Considering the times he had successfully avoided fully losing his temper and ruining everyone’s good time, Brick had learned to rely on the ludicrous, simple exercise.

Very few people were worth losing his shit over, and Brute Plutonium was decidedly not one of them.

As Brick focused on calming down, he picked up bits and pieces of Bubbles and Brute’s quiet conversation as they continued to work the puzzle tiles.

“You didn’t have to antagonize him like that,” Bubbles said.

“I didn’t,” Brute said.

“You did. We’re a team, so we should try to get along.”

“I don’t get along with children.”

“Well, that’s your loss. Besides, even children can be good puzzlers.”

Brick squeezed his eyes shut and imagined sitting in powder snow. If he concentrated hard enough he could feel the cold through his clothes, seeping into his muscles, numbing him to the bullshit that didn’t matter, that didn’t merit any sort of reaction. He began counting down from ten, letting go of the tension in his bones with each timed breath.

Bubbles sighed. “Look, I know it’s probably awkward for you having to work with him given what happened with Brat, but I think he’s actually doing a pretty good job—”

“With Brat?”

A spike of energy sucked the breath from Brick’s lungs, and he whirled to find Brute sparking green. When she met his eyes, something in them both snapped, primal and out for blood. Brick reacted on pure survival instinct that miraculously maintained the integrity of his spine as he deflected Brute’s savage sucker punch at the last second. Bubbles shouted something distinctly anguished. Abyssal green met bewildered red as the two of them circled each other around the table.

“What about Brat?” Brute demanded in a low, charnel voice reserved specifically for Brick, based on past experience.

Brick had no idea, except that somewhere in the back of his mind he had a pretty fucking good idea that was spectacularly unsuited to these cramped quarters with Bubbles caught in the middle.

“Calm down,” he said, and immediately regretted it when Brute flared like an absinthe trip.

“Stop!” Bubbles got in between them, her hands glowing blue and her eyes hard. “We can’t fight in here.”

“Move,” Brute said.

“I’m sorry,” Bubbles persisted. “I thought for sure you knew. You and Brat are so close, and I just assumed… I’m sorry, but Brick’s right. You have to calm down before someone gets hurt.”

Brick stared at Bubbles and the promise of white hot pain on the business end of her blue blaster. Suspicion became certainty, and certainty bred a twisted sort of paranoia. There was only one secret that could have gotten Brute so worked up, and there was no universe where Bubbles, of all people, had any right to know it. Her smoldering dislike for her counterpart was one of the first topics Brat had spoken to him about the night she invited him into her bed.

“Not until I hear it from him,” Brute said.

Regaining his footing now that the initial shock had passed, Brick said, “Brat and I had sex once, years ago. It wasn’t planned and it only ever happened the one time.”

Brute’s hard eyes unfocused. The truth sank into her so deep she seemed to devour it whole. For a manic second, Brick almost felt bad. “She would have told me,” Brute muttered, hollow.

“I’m so sorry,” Bubbles said again, and when she turned to look at Brick, he could see that she genuinely was.

“What did you do?” Brute said with a distinct _fuck you_ edge to her tone.

Swallowing the anger and ignominy of having to hash out something so personal with people who had no right to it, Brick kept his voice level and calm: “I don’t know.”

Brute bared her teeth and advanced two steps around the table. “Liar!”

Bubbles moved with her, but she didn’t back down. It would cost her if Brick didn’t defuse the situation quickly.

“I’m not lying. We hooked up once. I was into it, and I thought she was too. But the next morning, she asked me to leave, so I did. She wasn’t interested in anything beyond that. End of story.”

“She wasn’t?” Bubbles asked, and Brick’s paranoia reared its ugly head again.

“No,” he said sharply. “To be honest, I was interested in seeing her again, but she didn’t want to, so I didn’t push it.”

“And I should just believe you,” Brute said.

Brick looked at her long and hard. She heaved in her green tank top like she’d just sprinted, taut and tense, and sweat beaded her brow beneath her long, black bangs. The glimmer in her eyes could have been distance and denial, but there was a hopelessness in her muscles that wound so tightly with no release in reach. Dejection was as wrong a look on her as it had been on Brat that grey morning so long ago. Then, as now, he couldn’t understand it.

Perhaps that was why he bared his palms and took a cautious step closer. “Yes.”

Maybe she did believe him. Maybe she simply trusted her sister more than she trusted her own anger. At length, Brute’s shoulders lost their tension and she averted her gaze. It was over. The X static in the room slowly dissipated, and Brick drew a breath that didn’t burn so much. He allowed himself this short respite.

Then, he turned on Bubbles. “There’s no way in hell Brat told you about us. So how did you find out?”

Penned in by Brick in front and Brute in back, Bubbles nonetheless stood her ground. “I saw it in her dream.”

Brick was so taken aback by the ridiculous certainty of that statement that he quailed. “Come again?”

“We share dreams, Boomer and Brat and me. The first time it happened, Boomer and I walked in on her dream about you. Well, a version of it.”

_What the fuck does that mean?_

Brute was taking this absurd information surprisingly well. “Brat mentioned that,” she said.

Well, Boomer sure as shit had not. Come to think of it, Brick had spent very little time with his brothers lately while he was cooped up in the library trying to find a way off this godforsaken planet. That would be changing after they solved this trite toddler’s challenge.

“I never meant to intrude on something so personal,” Bubbles said. “This power isn’t something we’ve been able to control. It just keeps happening when we’re all together in the Blue Wing.”

Brute walked back around to her end of the table. “Let’s just finish this.”

Brick stared at her incredulously. For someone who had been on the brink of shoving her fist down his throat minutes ago, she took the revelation of this dangerous new room-specific power dynamic involving her sister well. Too well. Brick was about to question her, but Bubbles’ hand on his shoulder squeezed hard.

“I agree. The sooner we get out of here, the better. Right, Brick?”

Brute was focused on the puzzle and didn’t spare him a glance.

“Right,” Brick said.

But when they got out of here, he was getting some goddamned answers.

* * *

Feeling markedly better than he had this morning, Boomer had parted from Buttercup to grab a snack from the mess hall that afternoon. It was probably safe to head back to the Blue Wing now. Brat was busy sparring with Blossom and his brother, and Bubbles…

The granola bar Boomer had chosen melted into a horrible, chalky paste on his tongue, and he tossed the remains in a bin, no longer hungry.

 _I should apologize,_ he reasoned. But just the thought of it made him grind his teeth. Apologizing would mean explaining, and explaining meant opening old wounds. In his experience, digging the knife in deeper had only ever left him bleeding out while she moved on with her life. Nothing could ever get Bubbles down. He envied her that. On his worst days, he almost hated her for it. But Boomer had never found much use for hatred of any flavor.

He should apologize.

Apologize, and move on. She had years ago, and look how happy she was now. Apologize, and he could regain the ally and confidant he so desperately needed to sort through this ugly, worthless feeling. Buttercup’s solidarity had kept him sane, but there was only so far pep talks and punches could get him when he was brought this low. She wasn’t his counterpart.

He sensed Berserk coming too late to avoid her. Too caught up in his morose thoughts, his guard was down, and she was a raptor with her talons poised to snatch him up.

“Those bars are made of chalk, I swear.” Berserk leaned against the door frame in her Trinity reds, a raw wound upon the somber slate walls. The pleasing rasp in her voice scraped down the back of Boomer’s neck like nails. It felt like weeks since he’d last heard her voice, and still not long enough.

“I was just leaving,” he said, approaching the door.

She blocked his path and trapped him in her glowing gaze.

“Get out of my way,” he said.

“Where are you headed?”

“Move, please.”

She did not budge. “I’m starting to wonder if this House isn’t playing tricks on us. Changing when we’re not looking, you know. Spacey.” She wiggled her fingers as if she were performing magic.

Boomer’s throat constricted. He forced himself to breathe. “Berserk. _Move_.”

She let her arms fall to her sides. The playful mischief was gone from her expression, and he noticed the shadows under her eyes. They were bloodshot, not glowing, and her lips were badly chapped. Her skin had a papery, haggard sheen that told of torment. She looked like she’d recently undergone a violent exorcism. She looked like shit. “Don’t leave,” she commanded.

All the anxiety and exhaustion Boomer had been dragging around as he avoided Bubbles and traded blows with Buttercup and racked his brain for something, _anything_ to say to the brothers he barely ever saw these days that wouldn’t sound one hundred percent pathetic seized him by the hand, and he shoved Berserk out of his way into the table next to her.

He made it two steps before she grabbed his wrist and yanked him back. “You can’t walk away from me,” she said.

Boomer shoved her again, but she was ready this time and pushed him into the wall. The concrete cracked at his back, but he couldn’t be bothered to care. “I don’t take orders from you.”

“I’m your leader.”

A moment of wild rage gave him strength and drowned out the little voice in his head that told him to back off, this way lies danger. He grabbed her arms and pushed, and they crashed into the wall on the opposite side of the hallway with a crunch at her back. Blue and magenta sparks popped and sizzled as they struggled, but Boomer only pressed harder.

“You used me,” he snarled. “I gave you my hand, and you gave me to that monster.”

“Boomer, I didn’t—”

“You betrayed me!” His voice cracked with emotion. “I chose to trust you, and you threw me away the second it was convenient for you.”

She raised her quivering hand to his cheek, but he slapped it away before she could touch him. In a blink, he was back on the other side of the hallway trembling and right back where he’d started. So goddamned pathetic.

Ungraceful, she staggered away from the wall. “Look, I’m sorry, but I really thought—”

“Shut up,” he hissed. “Just shut up. I don’t want to hear it.”

He tried to leave again, and once again she got in his way. “I’m trying to fucking apologize here.”

“I don’t _care_.”

She got in his face, coiled and mean. “Well, you’re going to have to care if we’re going to work together again.”

All the rage and humiliation and despair he had been carrying around abandoned him now as he saw what was right in front of him. Perhaps they were suited. Perhaps even the House knew it, having thrown them together. There was nothing in her but a howling, empty wind, and there was nothing left in him to fight her.

“I don’t think you’ve ever helped anyone without there being something in it for you,” he said.

She pulled back, her hackles up and her eyes blown wide. “Don’t say that.”

“I bet you’ve never done a single thing out of the goodness of your heart for another person, have you?” he said.

She took a step back.

He pursued.

“And do you want to know how I know?”

Tears gathered in the corners of her eyes. “Stop it.”

“Because you have no one. Leader?” Her back hit the mended wall, but he felt nothing at all. “Who would ever follow a traitor?”

Fists or fury, he no longer cared what she threw at him. But she offered him neither as she clamped her hands over her mouth and stumbled back from him. If he hadn’t seen it with his own two eyes, Boomer never would have imagined her capable of the ruinous despair staring back at him now. And damn his tender heart, but even now, shucked bare and raw as a nerve ending, he felt for her.

Berserk disappeared in a magenta blur before he could act on that stubborn tendril of remorse, and he was alone again. Boomer hid his face in his hands, slumped against the wall, and muffled a scream.

* * *

This challenge was way too easy, and Bubbles did not trust it one bit. When her team finished the final puzzle and Brick fitted it into the painting on the wall—a painting which, with each successful puzzle they solved, popped out of the wall in 3D—the Key it depicted took shape.

“Is it real?” Bubbles asked.

Brute walked around the table to get a closer look.

“Yeah,” Brick said, reaching for it. He hesitated at the last second.

“Well?” Brute said. “Stop cockfooting around. I’m hungry.”

The brass Challenge Room Key sat on two hooks in the center of the frame. The black pyramid crest on its bow gleamed with a sheen of red in the pale light. Bubbles’ heart leaped into her throat as a hot flash possessed her full-body, and she broke out into a cold, nervous sweat. Something about that Key was wrong, so wrong, though she could not begin to explain what other than a morbid feeling.

She reached for Brick, and Brick reached for the Key. “Wait—”

The moment Brick grasped the Key in hand, the wall behind it splintered and broke with a thunderous crack. Bubbles lost her balance and fell with gravity that no longer made sense, and she scrambled to grab onto the closest solid anchor in reach, which happened to be Brute’s hand. They locked eyes, and Bubbles couldn’t be sure which of them was more surprised that Brute had saved her.

The wall beneath them had collapsed entirely, revealing a serrated pit that opened onto darkness. It stretched farther than Bubbles could see, its walls a whirlpool of moving stairs that reminded her of the painting’s backdrop. The same turbid, red haze that had receded into the walls the moment the trio had set foot in this Challenge Room oozed from the cracks with the oily consistency of a gas leak. The lurid glare combined with the escalator effect and the wonky gravity made Bubbles’ head spin, and she clutched Brute’s hand tighter for anything to ground herself.

In the midst of it all and fast shrinking down into the dark depths, Brick hurtled out of control, the Challenge Room Key still clutched in his hand.

“Brick!” Bubbles screamed. She turned back to Brute, who looked like she would rather chew glass than let go of the conference table.

The dimensional rift roared— _roared_ , like some chthonic beast waking from slumber—and Bubbles remembered herself.

“We have to save him! Please let go!” Bubbles yelled to be heard over the crunching concrete jowls.

Brute bared her teeth, but not at Bubbles. “Son of a bitch.”

She let go of the conference table, and the chasm swallowed them down.

* * *

Brute smacked the corrugated concrete so hard her teeth rattled in her skull, but even so, she didn’t let go of Bubbles’ hand. The tilt-o-whirl gravity fought her at every turn—what was up was down, and what was down was some really bad shit. Even so, they couldn’t leave that can of pickled dicks to his inter-dimensional death. Nobody deserved that.

Getting to him, however, was an exercise in nausea. “I can barely move!” Bubbles shouted to be heard over the infernal growling that, curiously, seemed to grow fainter the farther they failed to descend. No matter how hard Brute fought to fly deeper into the cave, they seemed to sink no lower.

It reeked like a gas station on fire, the telltale stench of raw Chemical X as potent as Brute remembered it growing up around her creator’s experiments. The red haze of it thickened as they jostled about, and Brute could see fuck-all. With a grunt of effort, she fired off her green blaster to clear the air, only for it to turn on her. If Bubbles had not yanked her out of the path, she would have taken the blast directly to her face.

Bubbles’ glassy, blue eyes were wide, but there was a lucidity to her alarm. “It’s getting softer the more we chase it!” she shouted to be heard.

“What?!”

“Just come on!”

Bubbles pulled Brute’s body after her, but her stomach went the other direction. Brute was grateful then that she had skipped lunch for this foray; the blender that had become her internal organs had nothing to grind as her body was drawn and quartered on the inter-dimensional level.

With the wind at her back and the growl growing louder, Brute swallowed her sickness and flew in reverse to keep up with Bubbles. Against all the laws of common sense, they began to descend in earnest after their wayward team leader.

“Brick!” Bubbles shouted to be heard.

There he was, sparking red with power and still hanging onto that damn Key as it reeled him in like a hooked fish. He flailed as the Key thrashed him against the moving walls, and it was a testament to his colossal ego that he hadn’t given up yet. He screwed his head around and caught sight of them. Whatever he shouted was lost to the malevolent walls that constricted tighter around the trio as they fell.

Bubbles flew faster and Brute was hard pressed to keep up with her speed, but they’d come this far for the guy, so hell if Brute was going to chicken out now.

“Let go!” she shouted, but there was no way Brick could hear her over the tectonic grind.

The red haze buffeted them with renewed vigor, and Brute wheezed. Her body sparked as her power screamed for release, overloaded, and soon she saw why. The source of the evil gas opened wide just beyond where this world ended. Teeth as long as a man each gleamed over a well of darkness that Brute knew in her bones would be the end of everything. Gaseous red steamed through the jaws that parted to receive Brick and the Key lure.

It was too loud to scream, to think. Only Bubbles’ hand in hers squeezing tight made any sense, and that too was gone in a heartbeat as Bubbles let go with nothing more than a one-word plea Brute couldn’t even hear:

_Go!_

Thirty yards.

Twenty.

Five.

Brute didn’t have the time to be pissed, but she did have time to reach for Brick—that champagne prick—and the Key he wouldn’t let get away. The thing was stuck to the lure good and tight, and the second Brute got ahold of it, it thrashed wildly. Pain exploded in her head and back as she ate concrete. No wonder Brick hadn’t been able to shake the damn thing loose.

The jaws stretched to swallow them, and Brute reached back the way she’d come intending to fire a last-ditch blaster. She barely had time to twist her body when Bubbles let rip a Sonic Scream that shattered the time-space continuum.

The walls tore at their seams, unleashing even more bloody light, and the very air rippled under the magnitude of Bubbles’ most powerful attack. The growling that had debilitated and disoriented the whole way down drowned under her shrieking, and Brute swerved out of the Scream’s direct path before her body succumbed to total paralysis. The concrete hurt, but it was solid and real. Brick, roller-coaster queasy and shaking from his chew toy joy ride, had the presence of mind to wrench the Key free of its lure.

Below, the cataclysmic jaws ground their teeth in what might have been pain as Bubbles finished her Scream and the echoes marinated in the dimensional rips with a ringing Brute was sure she would need a swimming pool’s worth of booze to un-hear.

Brick shoved the freed Key at Brute, his hand shaking with the immense effort, and he gave her the same instructions Bubbles had before:

“Go!”

Brute grabbed the Key, and then she grabbed him. “Fuck you!”

Flying toward her doom was no less unsettling than if it had actually brought her closer to it. The more Brute reached for those grinning jaws, the farther from them she got. With Brick’s rag doll body draped over her like a plastered eighteen-year-old commemorating his first week of Freshman year, it was all around not a good a time.

Bubbles crashed into them in the most uncomfortable person-sandwich Brute had ever been in the unfortunate middle of, but there were more important concerns, such as the lipless mouth masticating the walls below them and gaining.

“Together!” Bubbles said, and together she and Brute careened their way back up the nightmare gullet with Brick as their doom hunted them.

Thirty yards.

Twenty.

Five.

A boiling pop was Brute’s only warning before Brick shot a truly formidable laser eye beam directly over her head that fired in reverse, because there was a karmic consistency to the chaos in here. The red-hot energy missed the monster entirely, but it pierced one of the seams Bubbles’ Sonic Scream had ripped open. Red gas poured from the wound and collapsed the side of the shaft. The hungry maw roared and collapsed in on itself, set back just long enough for Bubbles and Brute to fly them out of there and crash into the conference table.

No sooner had they landed on the table than the gaping wall behind them reformed completely in reverse time, not even a hairline fracture out of place. The roaring silence of four solid walls set Brute’s head to pounding, and her vision swam. Heaving, she pushed Brick off and rolled onto her back on the conference table. Gravity had returned to normal as she stared at the ceiling and its hidden bar lights. Everything was still, and nobody moved.

Bubbles coughed after a moment or an eon, and Brute opened her eyes. She hadn’t even realized she’d closed them as her body remembered what it was to exist in one direction at a time. Beside her, Brick sat up and vomited over the side of the table. Which, fair.

“The Key?” Brick said, wiping his mouth.

Brute only then registered the dainty weight in her hand. Half as long as her forearm but light as a feather, the brass skeleton key was otherwise banal and wholly not worth almost getting chewed up and shat out by an inter-dimensional horror. Wanting nothing more to do with it, she handed it back to him. “You’re welcome for saving your ass.”

Brick accepted the Key and fixed his eerie gaze on Brute. “Thanks. Both of you.”

“Can we please get out of here?” Bubbles said in a raspy voice. “I really need some water.”

“Absolutely.”

Brute was sore and still in danger of throwing up herself, and perhaps this was why she decided not to question her teammates. In the end, she supposed they had come together as a team—a really shitty one that had gotten lucky the enemy existed on an unstable plane weak to a woman’s pure, unrestrained, Sonic rage, but a team nonetheless. It had been a long time since Brute had been on one of those, and the feeling was, surprisingly, not entirely unwelcome.

Bubbles’ hand on her shoulder when she slid off the table gave her pause. “Thanks for saving me,” she said. “I really am sorry for what I said before. I shouldn’t have assumed.”

There were a few tenets by which Brute lived her life: don’t mix business with pleasure, always repay your debts, and family comes first. Brat was Brute’s family, and all their lives, especially after Berserk had ejected herself from their story, Brat was the only family she had. She loved Brat, protected her, knew everything about her, including her deep-seated resentment of Bubbles.

Except, she didn’t know everything, and Bubbles had apologized. And that… Well, she wasn’t sure what it said about Brat. She wasn’t sure what it said about Brute herself. Maybe once her head didn’t feel like she had just lived through a botched trepanning, she would figure it out.

The moment passed before Brute had a chance to respond, and Bubbles smiled wearily and headed to the door where Brick waited.

“After you,” he insisted, once more looking directly at Brute.

She didn’t need to be told twice. Still in one piece, if a little disjointed, Brute followed Bubbles out of the Challenge Room, and Brick shut the door behind them.

* * *

When the Third Challenge Room door opened, Blossom forgot all about Berserk’s troubling silence when she asked her if she wanted to come along to receive their siblings. Berserk had simply gone to her room and shut the door. Out came Bubbles, followed closely by Brute. They both looked like they’d passed through a meat grinder and kicked the tar out of it on their way out.

“Bubbles!” Blossom swept her sister up in her arms. Buttercup was right behind her. “I was so worried about you. We both were.”

Bubbles whimpered in pain, and Blossom instantly loosened her hold to check her out. “I’m all right, just thirsty,” Bubbles rasped.

Buttercup lightly batted Brute’s shoulder. “I see you’re still alive.” She looked beyond her weary counterpart to the Challenge Room entrance. “Well, barely.”

Blossom followed her sister’s gaze to Brick, who tripped on his way out. He caught himself on the wall at the last second. Of the three of them, he was by far in the worst shape.

“Oh my god.” Blossom left Bubbles in Buttercup’s capable hands and caught Brick around his middle. “Easy. You can lean on me.”

Brick’s arm found its way over her shoulder, and she hoisted him up. He hissed when she applied pressure to his torso, and she eased off, wary of injuring him further. He took one look at her and frowned. “Are you wearing pajamas?”

“Brute!” Brat appeared in a blue blaze and launched herself at her sister. “Holy shit, you’re finally back!”

Brute grunted and would have fallen, but Butch was there to balance her. “Wow, you look like total crap.”

Brute must have been truly exhausted, because she didn’t even respond to Butch’s ribbing as she hugged her sister back like she’d been waiting years for this moment.

“It’s the middle of the night,” Blossom said, answering Brick’s original question.

Everyone was in their sleepwear and half passed out given the late hour.

“We were in there all day?” Bubbles asked.

“Try three days,” Boomer said. He lingered on the edge of the group near the top of the stairs at the mouth of the hallway.

“What?” Brute demanded. She had finally managed to peel Brat off her, but the two of them remained linked by the arms as Brat supported some of her weight.

“You were gone for three days,” Blossom confirmed when Brick looked down at her in disbelief. “At first, we didn’t realize you were actually in a Challenge Room, but when none of you showed up for dinner that first night, Asterion confirmed it.”

Brick’s weight shifted against her as he craned his neck to look at the automaton. “That’s interesting. Asterion never mentioned we were stepping into a time chamber.”

“Or the giant mouth hole that tried to eat us,” Brute said.

Brat grimaced. “Ew, what?”

“I’m going to die if I don’t get some water,” Bubbles said hoarsely. “Can we please—”

“Yeah, I got you,” Buttercup said. “I’ll take her back to her room. You good?” She cast a lingering look back at Blossom still supporting Brick.

“I think we should all head back to our rooms for the rest of the night,” Blossom agreed. “In the morning, you all can tell us what happened.”

“Let’s go.” Brat led Brute away, and Brute pulled them in line with Buttercup and Bubbles.

“How’s the room?” Brute asked her counterpart.

“Should stay quiet the rest of the night…”

Blossom strained to hear the rest of Brute and Buttercup’s conversation, but Butch stepped into her line of sight and offered his hand to Brick. “Need a lift?”

“I’m fine,” Brick said.

Butch quirked his eyebrows. “Yeah, I bet you are.”

“Eat shit.”

“Are you finished? I’m tired and you’re heavy,” Blossom said.

Brick shot her a warning look, but he shut up and hobbled along with her. They passed Boomer turning to tag along with Bubbles and Buttercup, and Brick grabbed his arm.

“We need to talk,” Brick said. “All of us.”

Something unspoken passed between the three brothers that Blossom could not read, and Boomer nodded. “Yeah, we do.”

“Sure. Until then, sleep nice and tight, slap-dicks,” Butch said with a grin.

He and Boomer headed off, and Blossom caught the “moron” Brick muttered under his breath. As soon as his brothers were gone, he gave up pretenses and sagged more of his weight on her.

She shimmied to readjust her grip on him. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get you in bed.”

“Sorry to disappoint, but I’m not getting anything up tonight.”

Blossom rolled her eyes. “If you think that tactic is ever going to get under my skin again after the way you literally choked last time, you’re deluded.”

Brick made a sound that may have been a breathy laugh, or a punctured lung. “Have you always been this high maintenance, or is it all just for my benefit?”

“Always. You’re not special.”

“Bullshit.”

She focused on maneuvering him up the stairs to the sleeping quarters rather than rising to his bait. Everyone else had already gone inside. Blossom reached for the door to the Red Wing, but Brick stopped her.

“Wait,” he said, and pulled a new Challenge Room Key from his jacket pocket.

Blossom accepted the feather-light Key with no small amount of surprise. “You’re giving it to me? Why?”

“You know why.” His gaze burned a hole through the Red Wing’s lacquered door.

Blossom chewed her lip. “Something’s really off with her. I don’t know how to help her.”

“Yeah.”

They lingered in the hall a moment, uncertain and with no idea how to process such an emotion. Blossom wondered if he felt it too, this sense of synchronicity she couldn’t explain yet couldn’t ignore. If, even after so many years apart and disconnected, he felt as close to her as she felt to him. Like time had stopped for them only to kick back into gear the day they’d landed on this strange planet together. Most of all, she wondered if Berserk felt it, and if it could ever be enough to mend what had broken. If Berserk would ever even allow them close enough to try.

Blossom pocketed the Challenge Room Key and led Brick back to their rooms for some much needed rest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time: Eric has an idea, and Robin doesn’t like it. Berserk dusts off the mantle of big sister.


End file.
